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A yard sale from Backyard Renaissance
For sale: used jacket, slightly stained, some wear and tear in back
“By nature, theater is an inefficient model,” says Francis Gercke, co-founder and artistic director of Backyard Renaissance theater company — a position that requires him to think about the “business” part of “show business” more than some. “It’s just not conducive to streamlining. We have this bedding we used for Misery — a full set, with quilts and pillowcases. But not every play calls for a bed” — and even if it did, “you don’t want people staring at the same furniture for three years in a row. Companies have to reinvent the wheel every time out. We had a period refrigerator for Smokefall, and we were thinking about using it for A Streetcar Named Desire. But we stumbled; we started worrying, ‘Is it going to look like the same refrigerator? We’ve got to get a different fridge.’ And that’s how you start to acquire stuff.”
This Sunday, from 7 am to noon at 7620 Lake Ree Avenue, Backyard Renaissance’s decade-plus of acquisition will become their loss and your gain. The Big Theatre Purge will offer for sale “the things that make magic happen onstage — fabulous costumes, quirky props, giant set pieces, mysterious objects that we swore we’d use again.” The books piled under the end table of an associate professor of history in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The handbag and luggage of a woman who’s always depended upon the kindness of strangers in A Streetcar Named Desire? The hotel room chairs from Bachelorette that are lovely and comfy but a little too corporate for most of the company's shows? All up for grabs — orphaned objects that Gercke hopes will find a home.
Now's your chance to own Blanche's baggage. The physical kind, anyway.
Or how about this? “We have the jacket that the sheriff wears in Misery. He was played by Alex Guzman, and he gets shot with a shotgun by Maggie Carney’s character. It was a really nice jacket, sort of an aviator style that a police officer might wear in a wintry part of the northeast. Our special effects coordinator Jeffery Neitzel blew out the back of the jacket and had blood and guts hanging from it. The spine was even showing. I couldn’t believe he was going to rip it up, and then once he completed it, it was like this work of art. But I said to him, ‘You’ve really screwed Jess and me, because we’re never going to get rid of this jacket. Who walks around with their spine out?’” Go ahead, prove him wrong.
“Jess” is Jessica John Gercke, co-founder and executive director of the company. “One of her big loves is wardrobe — finding pieces that not only look good, but feel like the character has lived in them. That they purchased it themselves, and it shows them off in a good light even as it tells the story. She’s putting stuff on the rack, and I’m like, ‘You really want to get rid of that dress? It looks dynamite on you!’ There’s great stuff: things with tassels, really nice faux fur.”
Of course, not every actor is supposed to look good. “There’s this great pair of shorts that Mike Sears wore for our first-ever show, Parlour Song.” His character, Ned, is written as being rotund. Sears was…not. To drive the mismatch home, “Jessica specifically got him shorts that didn’t fit particularly well and weren’t particularly stylish. As weird and creepy as it sounds, I hope nobody takes those shorts, because they are the ultimate red badge of courage for me — that an actor put them on and performed a full run of shows in them.” (For his bravery, Sears was awarded the Craig Noel Award for Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play.)
Prepping for the sale has brought a thousand stories like that out of storage. “Moving sucks,” says Gercke. “I am a hoarder. Everything has this deeply personal story for me. But it’s still fun for Jess and me. There was this very nice futon, and we were trying to figure out what production it was from. And so we went through our old production photos, and that sent us down memory lane.” Eventually, they figured out it was from Mr. and Mrs. Fitch, which they put on over at Moxie Theatre on El Cajon Boulevard. “The actors had to be careful not to lean on it in a certain way so that it didn’t fall back and become a bed in the middle of a scene. That would have changed the tone of the play.” Backyard Renaissance “spent hours on that futon, and then we didn’t touch it for seven years. And then it occupied two hours of a Friday morning. But we said, ‘We can’t be doing this. We have to let the kids grow up and move out.’”
There are other reasons for selling, both mundane and otherwise. The mundane: “We currently have three storage spaces, and costs have really gone up in the last year. We realized that if we could get rid of those three storage spaces, we could actually come close to affording a monthly lease on a property, so that we would have a commercial residency. It’s not like we could afford a theater, but we could combine storage space, rehearsal space, and have the potential for a small cabaret space. It would be a better use of the contributions people provide.”
Which brings us to “otherwise.” “We’re always looking for a way to engage with the people who come to our shows and support our company. We like to do things that are a little more personal than what’s normally done.” Hence the promo flyer’s invitation: “Come rummage through 11 years of theatrical history and take home a piece of the show.” And maybe pick up a story to take home along with it.
Here's something you might be interested in.
A yard sale from Backyard Renaissance
A yard sale from Backyard Renaissance
For sale: used jacket, slightly stained, some wear and tear in back
“By nature, theater is an inefficient model,” says Francis Gercke, co-founder and artistic director of Backyard Renaissance theater company — a position that requires him to think about the “business” part of “show business” more than some. “It’s just not conducive to streamlining. We have this bedding we used for Misery — a full set, with quilts and pillowcases. But not every play calls for a bed” — and even if it did, “you don’t want people staring at the same furniture for three years in a row. Companies have to reinvent the wheel every time out. We had a period refrigerator for Smokefall, and we were thinking about using it for A Streetcar Named Desire. But we stumbled; we started worrying, ‘Is it going to look like the same refrigerator? We’ve got to get a different fridge.’ And that’s how you start to acquire stuff.”
This Sunday, from 7 am to noon at 7620 Lake Ree Avenue, Backyard Renaissance’s decade-plus of acquisition will become their loss and your gain. The Big Theatre Purge will offer for sale “the things that make magic happen onstage — fabulous costumes, quirky props, giant set pieces, mysterious objects that we swore we’d use again.” The books piled under the end table of an associate professor of history in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The handbag and luggage of a woman who’s always depended upon the kindness of strangers in A Streetcar Named Desire? The hotel room chairs from Bachelorette that are lovely and comfy but a little too corporate for most of the company's shows? All up for grabs — orphaned objects that Gercke hopes will find a home.
Now's your chance to own Blanche's baggage. The physical kind, anyway.
Or how about this? “We have the jacket that the sheriff wears in Misery. He was played by Alex Guzman, and he gets shot with a shotgun by Maggie Carney’s character. It was a really nice jacket, sort of an aviator style that a police officer might wear in a wintry part of the northeast. Our special effects coordinator Jeffery Neitzel blew out the back of the jacket and had blood and guts hanging from it. The spine was even showing. I couldn’t believe he was going to rip it up, and then once he completed it, it was like this work of art. But I said to him, ‘You’ve really screwed Jess and me, because we’re never going to get rid of this jacket. Who walks around with their spine out?’” Go ahead, prove him wrong.
“Jess” is Jessica John Gercke, co-founder and executive director of the company. “One of her big loves is wardrobe — finding pieces that not only look good, but feel like the character has lived in them. That they purchased it themselves, and it shows them off in a good light even as it tells the story. She’s putting stuff on the rack, and I’m like, ‘You really want to get rid of that dress? It looks dynamite on you!’ There’s great stuff: things with tassels, really nice faux fur.”
Of course, not every actor is supposed to look good. “There’s this great pair of shorts that Mike Sears wore for our first-ever show, Parlour Song.” His character, Ned, is written as being rotund. Sears was…not. To drive the mismatch home, “Jessica specifically got him shorts that didn’t fit particularly well and weren’t particularly stylish. As weird and creepy as it sounds, I hope nobody takes those shorts, because they are the ultimate red badge of courage for me — that an actor put them on and performed a full run of shows in them.” (For his bravery, Sears was awarded the Craig Noel Award for Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play.)
Prepping for the sale has brought a thousand stories like that out of storage. “Moving sucks,” says Gercke. “I am a hoarder. Everything has this deeply personal story for me. But it’s still fun for Jess and me. There was this very nice futon, and we were trying to figure out what production it was from. And so we went through our old production photos, and that sent us down memory lane.” Eventually, they figured out it was from Mr. and Mrs. Fitch, which they put on over at Moxie Theatre on El Cajon Boulevard. “The actors had to be careful not to lean on it in a certain way so that it didn’t fall back and become a bed in the middle of a scene. That would have changed the tone of the play.” Backyard Renaissance “spent hours on that futon, and then we didn’t touch it for seven years. And then it occupied two hours of a Friday morning. But we said, ‘We can’t be doing this. We have to let the kids grow up and move out.’”
There are other reasons for selling, both mundane and otherwise. The mundane: “We currently have three storage spaces, and costs have really gone up in the last year. We realized that if we could get rid of those three storage spaces, we could actually come close to affording a monthly lease on a property, so that we would have a commercial residency. It’s not like we could afford a theater, but we could combine storage space, rehearsal space, and have the potential for a small cabaret space. It would be a better use of the contributions people provide.”
Which brings us to “otherwise.” “We’re always looking for a way to engage with the people who come to our shows and support our company. We like to do things that are a little more personal than what’s normally done.” Hence the promo flyer’s invitation: “Come rummage through 11 years of theatrical history and take home a piece of the show.” And maybe pick up a story to take home along with it.
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