Waiting for Lefty Chicago

It's not as if Chicago audiences had never seen stage precipitation before. Steppenwolf's rain machine received almost as much press as its actors throughout the 1990s, and just last year, The Hypocrites' Fall of the House of Usher featured the title mansion springing leaks like a shotgun shack in Florida.

What distinguishes the spectacle in Oracle Theatre's production of Clifford Odets' pro-labor Waiting For Lefty from its predecessors is not just that the company operates on a WPA-lean budget in a likewise spartan 1911-vintage storefront, but that its scenery consists of chalkboards proclaiming our proletariat heroes' fragile sentiments, only to have them erased, literally, by the capitalist bullies in authority. As long as the weapons are restricted to simple line drawings and damp rags, this visual metaphor presents no difficulties, but the climax of the action calls for the striking workers to take to the streets, scrawling their manifesto on the cityscape in defiance of the deluge that strives—but never quite succeeds—in washing it away.

The aqueduct system required to pull off this effect rivals that of Caesar's Rome. Designer Justin Snyder explains, "The process originates from a storage tank in the basement. A submersible pump brings the three gallons of water up to the lighting grid, where it is then channeled through a two-inch PVC pipe."

That's only the beginning, however. The pipes are equipped with holes that drain the contents onto sheets of corrugated plastic affixed to the ceiling, down which it streams to cascade over a graffiti-covered wall, before being collected in household-weight rain gutters. What Caesar's engineers wouldn't have given for a Home Depot in the Piazza Palatino!

How about the inevitable splash factor associated with free-falling fluids? "We had some issues at first with spillage over the sides of the plastic and the gutters," reports Stage Manager Amy Hopkins, "but that was easily fixed with silicon caulk. So far, the puddles haven't been big enough to create a hazard to actors' footing, and audiences don't seem to mind catching a few drips."

The hardest part of the design, according to Snyder, was "lining up the plastic panels so the waterfall was all on the same plane." Its operation, however, makes for a different kind of challenge, says Hopkins.

"The first scene's chalk drawings are already set long before curtain time, so we can't test the flow-path before the show. There's just too much risk of leaving a damp wall surface, or one marked with leftover drops. All we can do is make sure everything is working correctly and then hold our breath until it runs its whole course."

Waiting For Lefty runs at Oracle Theatre through July 27.

Mary Shen Barnidge
Contributing Writer