Once on This Island is a case of art imitating life. In September of 2017 Hurricane Irma slammed into Fort Myers, FL. as a category 4 hurricane. The original forecast for the storm had it making landfall just south of North Port, FL.. A mandatory evacuation order was under effect for most of the Florida peninsula. Long lines of cars streaming out of the state caused fuel shortages and traffic jams making it impossible to escape the storm barreling towards our community. On September 9th North Port High School was opened as a hurricane shelter, by September 10th we had reached our capacity of 1,000 residents. When the storm came onshore on September 11th, we had over 3,000 people filling every classroom, hallway, and large space on campus. The shelter was staffed by faculty and staff from the high school. Many of the students and their families sought shelter inside classrooms. Fortunately, the storm shifted further south, and our theatre was spared a direct hit from the storm. The trauma of this event shook our community and left scars that can still be seen today. A year later during the fall semester of the 2018 school year, our Director suggested the idea of producing Once on This Island. We all felt the themes in the piece were easily accessible to our students who had spent time the previous year sheltering from a storm. We hoped that by producing this play we could show the students the therapeutic benefits of artistic expression. The financial challenges of presenting two musicals in one year would put considerable strain on our department, but we felt the educational benefits for the students far outweighed the financial cons.

Budgetary Constraints 

At North Port High School our typical budget was $700 per semester. Our season normally consisted of three plays and one musical. When we decided to produce Once on this Island, we committed a substantial portion of our usual scenic budget to pay for rights and scripts. This meant that we needed to approach this show with minimal investment into scenery, and costumes. We chose to incorporate our lived experience into our concept. We designed the show to be performed in a theatrical version of our high school gymnasium using found objects for costumes and props. Our only major investment in scenery was the large windows we constructed to hang above the stage. 

Scenery on A Tight Budget  

Since we had decided our setting was going to be in the high school gymnasium, I knew there were elements I would need to include to have an accurate recreation. The gym at North Port High School has distinct windows that line the tops of the walls just below the ceilings. There are also murals painted on the walls and “North Port Bobcats” painted across the wall. We wanted to incorporate all. of this into the design, so we started exploring stylized concepts that would create a fantastical version of the gym while giving the audience a clear idea of the location. 

The wall flats were made of two stock 4’-0” X 8’-0” flats bolted together. We had 20 of these flats in stock and plenty of rigging hardware to fly them. This meant that we could create a custom backdrop for the show without spending any money. It is important to note that we acquired all these flats over time by building them as part of our curriculum. every year the students would build 4-6 flats depending on class size. The flats would then be placed in stock once the project was complete. Some of these flats were not of the best quality, but we could make repairs when we pulled them for shows. Having these flats in stock allowed us to build some exceptionally large sets with little investment, but they took up a considerable amount of space for storage. For our program this amount of scenery storage made sense. We had a large space and would often need to build large sets to accommodate the shows we were producing. A front-end investment in stock scenery allowed our sets to become bigger and more elaborate over time. I would love to take credit for implementing this idea, but the challenging work had already been done by the time I came back to North Port. The credit goes to Ryan Oliver, my friend, and colleague who has maintained the space and been a DeFacto chair for the department since 2001. Ryan’s management skills have secured a solid foundation for the production side of North Port High School’s theatre department. It takes little effort to see the scope that the classes could operate in with the equipment and scenery in stock. Based on my conversations with Ryan the budgets for the shows had not increased in several years. He requested two purchase orders of $700.00 per year because the scenery stock was managed well every year that $1,400.00 budget could get stretched a little further. North Port High School understands how to do scenery on a tight budget.

The Paint treatment for this show was similar to the brick treatment that we used for Shrek two years earlier. We changed the color of paint to better match the white brick walls in the gym, and we mapped out large block letters on the walls after the brick treatment was completed. The walls were spaced out and hung at various levels to allow for light from the cyc to bleed through and create a fanciful environment once the story began.

The bleacher seating was a structure that consisted of 4’-0” x 8’-0” platforms stacked on top of one another with a smaller 2’-0” x 8’-0” platform acting as the seat. Normally a structure this large would have cost quite a bit to build, but at North Port High school we had a large stock of platforms ready to be used for our shows. Even the legs for this piece were stock. When I worked at the Cleveland Public Theatre, we would work at a breakneck pace to build scenery. One of the ways we were able to meet our tight deadlines was by using a stock leg system for all our seating risers. When I started at North Port High School this was a system that I thought would be useful in our production process.

I have seen stock leg systems used in several theatres that I have visited. If you have the storage space, they can be time and money savers. My system has always used 6” centers as the difference in my leg lengths. Which means that my leg’s length increases in 6” increments. At North Port we would keep them in 6” increments until we hit 3’-0”, then we would transition to 1’ increments. Different systems exist to fit their spaces need. A colleague at another school used 8” centers for his stock legs. The most important part of the system is to have each leg clearly marked with the length. I used the same system at North Port High that I used at the Cleveland Public Theatre, each leg was marked with “S#” the “S” meant Stock, and the number represented the height of the platform once the leg was installed. S18 meant that the leg was for an 18” tall Platform, while S4 meant that the leg was for a 4’ tall platform. It is important to note that once you extend past a certain height it becomes important to begin to think about using stud walls instead of individual legs on your platforms. I start looking at building stud walls when my platforms reach 6’-0” tall. If you cannot afford the increased cost of stud walls; then additional cross-bracing should be applied to the legs to reduce movement.  

The windows were simple 1x2 frames that were glued and screwed together. Each window had four pick lines. We toyed with the idea of covering the back of the windows with fabric or plastic, but in the end, it did not add to the effect we were trying to achieve. Instead, we lowered the cyc to help create some distance between the actors and the walls behind them. The windows were our largest investment coming in just shy of $100 for lumber and hardware. Everything else in the show was pulled from stock.  

Sounds of The Storm  

As the audience entered the space they would be confronted with the sounds of the approaching storm. Throughout the show, our student designer created a loop of rain and wind that was ever-present. We wanted to re-capture the feeling of impending doom that so many audience members felt in the days before hurricane Irma. The storm was meant to be a character in our show, and we tasked a student's designer with carrying out this challenge. He met the moment and delivered a product far beyond my expectations for such a young artist. News clips played before the show and during intermission as wind and rain pounded through the speakers. Onstage the performers transported the audience away from their bleak circumstances and into a magical world.  

Evaluation 

Although Once on This Island was a scenically simple show compared to other fully realized productions at North Port High School, only requiring only a set of risers, some flown walls, and windows. It was a powerful piece that resonated with our students and community. The budgetary constraints made it difficult to create an intricate or overly complicated set for this production, but those challenges lead us down a path that helped us ground this fantasy show in our community and make it more relatable to the students involved. Hurricane Irma is a significant event in the lives of the people that lived through it. North Port High School’s Production of Once on This Island was a manifestation of that trauma. It was certainly a special production that showed our students the healing power of theatre.