Thank God. I’m quite useless as a stage manager -- I had half a quarter on the subject of stage management, and that was when I was a freshman. Chrissy and Jing are a blessing -- they help with chairs; they take notes; they stay on book; they make contact sheets and prop lists and charts of who is in which scene; they are generally amazing.
We’re running Act 1 tonight. We face our first and original problem: how to distinguish the news anchor and the two spokesmen, played by Nate, Matt, and Adi, from Quentin, Jakob, and Hassan, played by Nate, Matt, and Adi? On the one hand it seems obvious -- Quentin is a 24-year-old just out of grad school, not a news anchor; Jakob, is an unemployed linguist, not a network spokesman; Hassan is a puppeteer, not an emissary from a conservative think-tank. But we see the anchor and the spokesmen first, and, as our parents always told us, first impressions count. We’ve settled the question by seating them initially with their backs to the audience, and distorting their voices. Matt does a fine vocal impression of a Kentucky academic; Nate says he is impersonating Tucker Carlson. Adi hesitates, then produces a pompous bellow. “It’s my funny-news-guy voice.”
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