The Play Was Great!

This past Sunday saw the final two performances of The Real Inspector Hound as put on by the Gwangju Performance Project. We had five shows in all, and at Sunday night's cast party, we all agreed that the 3pm matinee earlier that day was the best.

As any good live theatrical performance, the show was not without its problems! My responsibility was sound, and because I love it, I take it seriously when something goes wrong, even if that something is completely out of my hands. Our Saturday night performance, the one my sister and most of my friends were at, proved to be the turning point for the old sound board in the tech booth: it blew a fuse when I started playing a phone ring to bring up the next scene. I had a few minutes before my next sound cue, so with that one missed, I was able to play around with the board and somehow got it working for the rest of the show. The theater staff refused to bring in a new board, citing that the new channel configuration seemed to work well and all should be fine. Don't worry. After the show, we switched some channels around and played with the levels, and the Sunday matinee was flawless. Halfway through the final show, however, the board blew it's final fuses and refused to work properly. I had to switch the entire configuration off and on again for it to hopefully work, and half of those times the cues were missed because the board decided it didn't want to work. As my only step of retaliation for not getting a new board and having the sound be, in my ears, completely ruined, I left my empty to-go coffee cup behind when we were supposed to clear out all of our trash. Rebellious me, I know. Maybe next time they'll get the waygooks a new sound board when the first one takes a dive halfway through.

The play was great, though, and the actors did amazingly fantastic at every show. Here are a few pictures from the show, but feel free to check out my Flickr site (by clicking any of the pictures in the list to the left) to see more!

The past few weekends have been the good kind of stressful, with me being able to work on something I love but haven't done in a long time. (The reasons why are too long and unnecessary to post here.) I hope to be able to work on another performance here in Korea, and I would love to try and do similar things while traveling around the world, if possible. Once I am settled back into a normal life (define 'normal' again, please?), I would like to pick it up again and never let it down.

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On a side note, my sister and Lee Ann, a good friend, came down from Daejeon for the Saturday evening performance and enjoyed it very much. Afterwards, we went out to dinner with Brandi, Yong Suk, and Diana to 'Seniors' restaurant, which is undoubtedly one of the best places to eat samgyupsal and galbi in Gwangju. (We really don't know the name of it, we all just call it 'Seniors' because it's owned by Yong Suk's 'senior', which is just the name for a friend who is older than you.) I really wish I would have taken a picture of all of us together, but I always forget to do things like that. At one point I believe a toast was made in my honor, and while I am a modest person and having the focus on me like that makes me somewhat uncomfortable, it made me feel good to know that my friends appreciated the play and my part in it.