About six months ago, a really good friend of mine and I decided to co-write and direct an Independent Production, retelling the story of the Ramayana in three different languages.
Somewhere along the way, “independent theatre” stopped meaning “no corporate backing” and started meaning “no backing whatsoever.” Five days before opening, our stage manager quit. Our lighting head quit. Our lighting unit, in a show of remarkable team spirit, also quit. Our props team has entered what I can only describe as a witness protection program.
So yes. Independent. As in: everyone involved is now independently responsible for four jobs they did not audition for.
Let me introduce the crew, and by crew I mean eleven jobs currently being done by six people.One of our Assistant Producers is also an actor, learning lines in one hand and a lighting cue sheet in the other. The other Assistant Producer and our lone Producer have, at various points this week, quietly become the props department, on the grounds that someone had to and nobody else raised a hand fast enough. Titles on paper say “producer.” Reality says “person currently cello-taping a sword back together on her knees, because the props team’s replacement plan was hope.” I personally ran a three-hour rehearsal, then had to announce it was running three hours over because the light cues did not exist yet.
There is a version of this article where I complain. This is not that article, mostly because complaining requires energy. Energy that I am currently spending on a single master props list, hand-numbered, laminated with packing tape, and guarding with the ferocity of a woman defending her firstborn. Every prop in this production answers to a rotating cast of producers now. We know where every item lives, who last held it, and what excuse they gave for not returning it. Nobody trains for this. You just wake up one day holding a clipboard, a laminated list and accept your fate.
Translation has become its own extreme sport, mostly conducted over voice notes sent at hours no rehearsal schedule should reasonably admit to. This week a monologue got translated at 1 a.m. via voice note, three of which were interrupted by our campus dog Noor barking directly into the mic. The translation survived. Noor is now, unofficially, part of the crew.
Rehearsal times exist now only as rough suggestions, agreed upon in a group chat, renegotiated in a second group chat, and finalized by whoever shows up first and starts yelling names. We have rehearsed in classrooms, hallways, and once, memorably, a stairwell, because the actual venue was double-booked and nobody found out until we arrived with props in hand.
Here is the truly independent part. There is no producer with a checkbook and nothing else to do, no stage manager with a headset and a calm voice, no lighting designer who has seen a theatre before this one. It is six overcaffeinated people, deciding collectively and somewhat insanely that the show goes up anyway. We fired two people five days out and did not cancel. We broke a lighting rig and did not cancel. We rehearsed in a stairwell and did not cancel.
Opening night, when it happens, will be held together by gaffer tape and the sheer refusal of everyone involved to let a broken lighting unit win. That is what independent means, it turns out. Not funding. Not freedom from a studio system. Just a production team that looked at total operational collapse and said, sure, we’ll also do that job.