The museum as theater

Ok, so a week is actually over a month.  *blush*

After the shootings in Aurora, I became a little busy with end of summer and oh-wow-winter-is-coming-early business as well as a surprise surgery with subsequent recovery.  I am fine, and the last thing I want to do is post to my professional blog while toasty on pain killers.  Needless to say, this took a backseat.  Actually, more like a bury it in the trunk and re-visit later kind of thing....

I apologize.

I had mentioned that I wanted to talk about actors in museums.  This is of particular interest to me as it is how I started in the museum field in 1998.  Prior to being hired as a museum re-enactor, I had never heard of any museum doing such a thing.  At Titanic: The Experience, we gave tours in the first person and interacted with other actors as the case may be.  We started with strict scripts (a la Disney-type character spiels) but threw that out the window on opening day when we realized that the 6 months of rehearsing meant nothing.  The audience rejected it immediately.  We all had some sort of improv background and immediately switched to that, using the scripts as guides more than anything else.  We did not allow videotaping, so none of this has surfaced on an easy to link to youtube clip.  The tour takes on the timeline of the life of the Titanic from a scribble on a cocktail napkin to the most recent movies and dives.  Prior to the collision room (where the ship meets the iceberg... digitally, of course), it is a very lively and funny tour.  Funny?  Titanic?  Does not compute.  But it worked.  Sure, history had to be bent a little... things like: a historical first class lady would never be seen without her husband around (ours were), our Mrs. Brown was always referred to as Molly (even tho historically that is not true, however, we did get the stamp of approval from her descendant Muffett), officers would never mingle with the passengers (ours did), and the classes never mixed (ours did).

Why the veering off course from actual history with our actors?  Two main reasons: 1) Our location was unique to the museum world.  It was on International Drive in the heart of the tourist district of Orlando, just around the corner from Sea World and Universal Studios.  Walt Disney World was about 10 minutes away.  Many tourists stay in I-Drive for its affordability.  Therefore, we were in direct competition with the theme parks and dinner shows like Pirates and Medieval Times.  To effectively compete, we had to draw upon their model of entertainment as opposed to say, Gettysburg for example.  2) Guest Service dictates that if we were to be historically accurate, we would be impolite and even insulting.  Some of the historical figures portrayed were not nice people to the general public.  Lady Duff-Gordan would likely treat someone approaching her wearing a mouse-ear hat, shorts, and sandals with disdain.  Granted, we had a little fun with tourists in this manner, but we spun it so that they would be entertained or, as we said it, "edu-tained."  As in, "Ah! I see you've found the swimming bath!  Isn't it extraordinary!  It's even heated!  And look at the swimming bath tile the builders left out for display!  Made by Villeroy and Boch!  Only the finest ceramics!"  We stayed as close to history as possible while still putting on an entertaining show in costumes made of materials more suited to the Florida heat, and educating the public simultaneously.

One of my favorite improv bits, and this came purely from thin air, was when I was portraying Dorothy Gibson, an early movie star.  Second Officer Lightoller enters the room as I am explaining the fineries of a first class stateroom (as depicted in our re-creation of suite B-52).  I start complaining to him that I need to find the Marconi room to send a Marconigram to my agent in New Jersey.  I need to  ask my agent why I was booked in a closet on E-deck instead of the suite on B-deck and then fire him.  "Lights" then launches into an explanation of the Marconi room, mentions the operators by name, and notices someone lurking in the corner.  It's a third class man who has snuck up to first class to see the movie star (actually, it was the actor's turn to go to a different part of the exhibit in our rotation, and we had a rule that when you cross another actor, you must interact).  I start squeeling as if I've seen a rat.  Lights argues with the starstruck man then, and this was straight out of the movie Tombstone, grabs him by the ear, says "alright youngster, out ya go", and drags him out of the room.  The audience enthusiastically applauds and I continue the tour.

The irony of this is that the actor playing Officer Lightoller was a Wyatt Earp re-enactor at another museum in Wyoming prior to joining the cast.

This Dorothy and Lights show, as we called it, became a bit of a legend.  Another time, again pure improv, Lights asked me (as Dorothy) in a joking manner if I thought he could be a movie star.  I think for a moment and say, "well, you know, you do somewhat resemble that new comedian I saw the last time I was at that chicken farm in Los Angeles.... what was his name... oh yes!  Lon Chaney!"  And he would get disgusted and the guests would laugh.  Actually, there is a lion's share of fact in there.  Lon Chaney, Sr. was a comedian in early 1912 in Los Angeles.  The chicken farm I mentioned was Universal Studios, also started in 1912, where Mr. Chaney was made into a legend of the horror genre.  Mr. Chaney's first film with IMP (early Universal Studios) was in 1913 - Poor Jake's Demise. 

During my time as an actor at Titanic, prior to becoming a member of the senior management team around late 2000/early 2001, we toyed with the wandering actor role.  Where it is not a tour, but guests intermingle with actors as they wander the museum.  This failed miserably.  As I've seen more and more actors in museums, I have rarely seen this method of museum theater work.  Too often, the actors become bored, do their minimal bits, and wander off - constantly checking the clocks to see when it is time to leave.  Improv is a peculiar animal.  If the audience is not engaged, more often than not the actor is insulted and bored.  I witnessed this recently at the Golden Historical Park in Golden, Colorado.  I met one of the actors there and she wasn't even attempting to act.  There is a Saturday Night Live skit from several years ago with Britney Spears at Colonial Williamsburg where she is sooooo booooored churning butter that she is no longer engaging the audience.  That's how I felt with this situation.  It was the same that many of the Titanic actors fell into.  Apathetic boredom.  The response I got from her, as I was asking her historical questions about the gardens, schoolhouse, mill, etc, was accurate info... but info that I could find just as easily on my smartphone with a couple swipes of my finger.  She then went on to complain about how marketing never brings in anyone anymore.  They all want to rent a tire and float down the river that flows on the boarder of this truly magnificent park.  I can't say that I blame the potential audience for wanting to jump in the river instead of wander thru the park.  The park was interesting until she put a negative spin on it.  Then, I just wanted to leave and not return.  It was 101F that day.  If I had known about the tire rental and the river, I would have dressed more appropriately and brought a little extra pocket money to go cool off.  Now, as an audience member, I'd rather re-visit Golden for that river and a frozen yogurt place I found.  I really have no desire to see that park again.

As a stage manager and fellow actor, I do not care if you are bored.  You are an actor.  Do your job or go home.  A whiny costumed docent does nothing for your organization but alienate your audience.  Always play to the audience.  Always.  Always.  Always.  In improv, they will dictate where you go next.  But, you as an actor dictate where they end up.  And, as the saying goes, always leave them coming back for more!

Just last week, I witnessed the wandering actor bit work for the second time in the same venue.  Incidentally, one of the actors was in both instances.  Both times were at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  The first was during the touring exhibit Pirates last year.  She played a Colonial villager whose sailor brother had not returned from a recent trip.  She feared he had been kidnapped by pirates.  Come to find out that her brother's story was detailed on a plaque later in the exhibit where he joined with the Pirates to assist with family financing and was subsequently hanged when captured.  She was engaging and played to each individual audience member with her story.  Last week, I attended a preview of A Day in Pompeii, also at DMNS.  It is an excellent exhibit, by the way, and I highly recommend it if you are in the Denver area any time between now and mid-January.  The same actress played the Senator's wife with just as much vigor and engagement.  I also ended up in another lively conversation with a priestess of Venus as well as an oil merchant and a slave girl (who had just captured a fat doormouse for her dinner).

I ask all who read this to take some time and search The Adventurer's Club at Walt Disney World/Pleasure Island on youtube.  When I was challenged with taking over direction of the Titanic cast, I strove to emulate their rhythms and structure.  No, we cannot be that vulgar, even if it is Disney's version of vulgarity.  It would be degrade the exhibit space.  However, the cues are the same: outlines, but no script;  timed structure, but a lot of free rein.  The audience is an actor's master.  However, the actor dictates the story that the audience experiences.

That is what I am getting at: audience experience.  We were given two minutes to lecture on anything we wanted during my masters class summer school in Leicester.  I chose two subjects for the professors to pick from.  They chose both and gave me four minutes.  :)  The first was on QR codes, a subject for a later blog post.  The other was on actors.  In the UK, the museum as theater is a novel, unusual, and rarely used tool in museum storytelling.  Only a scant paragraph or two was allotted to the subject in our studies.  I chose it because it appears to be uniquely American-originating and growing.  Out of the museums I've visited in England, I've only seen one with actors and that is the Sherlock Holmes museum, which is a tourist-trap museum.... albeit a delightfully FUN tourist-trap museum that I will gladly re-visit.  In order to demonstrate how actors in a museum work, I dropped into my characterization of Marion Thayer, one of the first-class, old-money, millionaire wives on Titanic.  Within seconds of becoming Mrs. Thayer, I had an enraptured audience.  That sense of being catapulted back in time and speaking with someone who was "actually there" has a mystifying effect that a simple video or static sign cannot capture.

At Titanic, we made it a point to rotate out the actors and their characters on a regular basis with the goal of never having an audience member see the same tour from the same perspective with the same character twice.  And we succeeded.  It was extraordinarily rare for someone to encounter the same actor in the same character twice during tours, even when visits were months or years apart.  Each of us began with two assigned characters, type-cast from the casting director (which, starting around 2002, was me).  After the actor masters the two characters, they can bring in other characters to their artistic arsenal as they please, pending approval from either myself or one of the other two senior managers authorized to approve this.  That way, as the actor learned the Titanic story, certain personalities "call out" to the individual.  And with over 2200 personalities to research, the variety is endless.  I felt particularly drawn to Edith Russell, she who carried the musical pig off of the ship and ultimately became the first female war corespondent in WWI.  So, with approval, I took her on and she became my primary of 12 different characters I played as the need arose.  Even senior managers were expected to don costumes and give tours where needed.  Plus, when we brought in the dinner show (a full 3-hour production complete with multi-course meals, bar, musicians, and a multi-character museum tour), it came to light that it was better for the production to have the stage manager for the night be in the show.

Utilizing actors to enhance the story is a delicate matter as it can just as easily fail as succeed.  Visitor surveys need to be carefully scrutinized to make sure that utilizing the museum as a theater is both appropriate and financially sound.  Working with actors as employees can be a daunting task as the very nature of being an actor is rather nomadic and many tend to double or triple book themselves.  An actor working 5-8 gigs at any given time is typical in the Orlando area.  This makes scheduling and basic HR a nightmare (not to mention tax accountants working overtime to handle all the W-2's at the end of the year).  Then, there is the question of unions.  I am familiar with one Orlando museum that is an Equity house.  At Titanic, we ran into some trouble filming the actors who were members of SAG.  While unions in the theater community are desperately necessary, working with actors makes it equally necessary for HR to comply with AEA/SAG regulations.  If a museum wishes to engage actors in their space, the marriage of museum and theater tends to be a rocky one that can go either the way of disaster or the way of repeat business.  The goal is to strive for the latter, to create that sense of wonder at the unexpected.  Word of mouth is the most powerful advertising mechanism.  If a movie is horrible, the world will know in a day or two.   The same goes for museum theater.  If it is lousy, the world will know.  If it is incredible, the world will keep coming back for more.  If you can catch that theater magic in the walls of a museum without degrading the exhibit space, you have that golden ticket for a successful museum - repeat business.