CG.Drama: True Plymouth Rock Stories

This past weekend, we performed True Plymouth Rock Stories an adaptation of a script Joanna Siu wrote for VGM2004. Being the overly critical and perfectionist self, I couldn't leave well enough alone. I grafted my brand of humor into the script as well as correcting many of the gross historical inaccuracies.

I know that whenever I watch movies or plays or what not, whenever I see some sort of factual error; it becomes very difficult for me to take the piece seriously. This is especially true when it apperas that the creators or writers are trying to be serious with their material. One small example is in Kill Bill vol 1. Towards the very beginning, when the Bride wakes up from her coma, she says that her muscles have entropied. I don't even think entropy has a past tense. It's not like it takes a lot of effort to find out if you are using a word correctly. For those who don't know, atrophy is the correct term. Luckily, that gripe wasn't too bad. It's not like the entire film's premise was based on that one line. but that's not my point.

So I started doing research on the Pilgrims and found this history of the original thanksgiving. This wouldn't have started if a coworker didn't ask "Wasn't it King Henry the VIII that killed his wives?". This spurred me to begin my research which cascaded to what it is today.

The performance on Sunday was good and bad. We performed for both the Mandarin and the English services. When I arrived at church, there was no power. I wasn't able to print out flyers nor test the sound from my laptop. It got to the point where we weren't even sure if we were going to be perform at all for the Mandarins. But the show had to go on. Little did I know how true we would have to adhear to that cliche.

Mandarin service started a little late, but at least they had power going to the projector and the sound system. I didn't get a chance to do a sound test, but things would be alright. Right? Wrong. Half way through the Mandarin service's worship, the power went completely out. It didn't come back on until after we had started performing. By then, they were a good half way through the sketch and I had to find the right spot in the video.

Even worse was during the majority of the performance, the fire alarm went off. I wasn't sure if we were supposed to leave or just continue. I felt awful as I watched my kids try to speak and shout over the blaring sound of the alarm. It was bad enough that they weren't miked to begin with, but this just exasperated things.

Eventually, The sound came back on. I caught up to where they were in the performance, which was pretty much the tail end of the show. Of course not testing the sound was disastrous. When it did come on, it was way too loud. Luckily there wasn't much left. Once we finished, we ran out of there as fast as we could.

We had about an hour until our next performance during English service. We practiced a little bit, but we were mainly rearing from the huge failure of Mandarin service. Of all the performances and of all the terrible things that we had performed over the years, none of them were as big of a failure as Mandarin service. Luckily, English service went much better. We still had a few sound issues, but they weren't anything major. Again, a failure to test the sound. I kept urging A/V to test my sound, but they didn't do a very good job.

Our last performance was last night at Rutgers University. Peter invited us down to perform for CCF. The night started out with audio issues. They couldn't get their own sound working and I kept urging them to let me do a sound test. Finally, they got around to me and low and behold, no sound from my laptop. The odd thing is, there was no signal going into the mixer. There wasn't even any sound coming out of my laptop speakers. I rebooted and tried again, but still, nothing. We decided to use Alan's laptop instead, but he didn't have the Flash player installed. Luckily, he had wireless and pulled it off the web. But the version he got was for his browser so I had to run the controls from there. The image quality was degraded and I had to right click and hit play for all the transitions. But things went well and we ran out of there.

This was the first time that we did anything this elaborate, where we had to coordinate video, sound, and live action. I don't want to say that we'll never do it again, as that's a bit severe; but it will definately be awhile before we try anything like this again. It's bad enough that we have to rely on mikes.

All in all, I'm pretty satisfied with the way things turned out. We were still laughing and having a good time even in the last practices. Sure we were still memorizing lines up until the last minute. But that's okay. This kind of stuff is growing experience.

And now, for our performance in April.