Lakeshore Weekly News: Stages Breaks New Ground

"Miss Nelson is Missing" didn't just open the latest season at Stages, it found the Hopkins-based children's theater breaking new, innovative technological ground.

To help bring the imaginative journeys the story's school children go on to find their "lost" teacher to the stage, Stages added a multi-media aspect to the piece, employing a pair of projection screens that mix actors into cartoon backdrops.

"We wanted it to be a modern classroom with a lot of modern technology, so we saw this as a great opportunity to use the technology to the stage. It was a way to experiment with some new and different ways to work with sets and multi-media," said director Cassandra Proball.

Technical director Michael Horejsi worked over the past months to bring that side of the show to life, using a new media server that has the tools for what Proball envisioned for the staging.

For the young performers, this meant trying something new: green-screen acting, where their performances are captured against a blank backdrop and then mixed into other images, in this case, illustrations that evoke those used in the original book by Harry Allard and James Marshall.

"Green screen work is becoming ubiquitous," Horejsi said, noting that it is not only used for film and TV work, but also motion capture for video games - all places professional actors can find work.

Using the green screen also meant that aspects of the show needed to be ready earlier than normal.

The costumes for those scenes needed to be done so they could be used in the sequences, while the actors needed to be ready for those scenes when they were recorded.

Beyond that, they also needed to understand the differences in acting on stage and on an empty set where they couldn't see any of the objects they were going to "interact" with in the final product.

"They had a lot of fun working with the green screen, but it was also a real eye opener for them. It helped them to understand the constraints and how a different medium requires different skills to work in that medium," Proball said.

Then again, the technology shouldn't overwhelm the production.

"You have to ask yourself, how does every aspect of the production fit the play? How does it serve the world of the play?" Proball said. "The technology is being used for two reasons, to help establish setting and to see what's going on in the heads of the characters as they imagine all the horrible things that may have happened to Miss Nelson."

"It's similar in approach to a musical number," Horejsi added. "When it happens, you go to another place. We have that in specifically chosen places here."

The projection screens are even used to simulate a popular modern teaching tool - the Smart Board. In this case, the board is rendered in the same illustrative style as the rest of the play.

"It's a cartoon board that operates like a Smart Board, just like the other parts of the set," Proball said.

All of this hasn't distracted the young - or adult - performers, Proball said.

"They've been incredibly professional. They come prepared and were off book and had the show memorized far earlier than I required," she said. "They adapt to changes really well. They were a bit distracted at first, but now they treat it like any other element of the show, like the lights."

~Ed Huyck, Writer