Free Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir by William B. Davis

succeed where the producers the previous summer had not.
    And they might have succeeded had they been more frugal. They offered me sixty dollars a week, a pretty big step up from the twenty-five I made the year before. I was thrilled to make sixty bucks a week at that time, but I would have done it for less. I don’t know what they paid the actors and directors, but I’m guessing it was more than the market would bear as, in the end, they only did the one season.
    The job of stage manager in summer stock at that time bears little relationship to what a stage manager does in a modern theatre. It was my job to build the scenery, a skill I had learned from working with Russ and likely the reason I was offered the job in the first place. But it was also my job to hang and focus the lights and operate the lighting board during performances. It was also my responsibility during performance to operate what we laughingly called the sound system and to manually operate the front curtain. Props and prompting, important in weekly stock, were generally handled by an ASM (Assistant Stage Manager) who had been in the rehearsals. I had not, at least not until the tech rehearsal.
    The company performed in the Port Carling Town Hall, the same building that the Straw Hat Players had used for so many years. The upper floor of the building was a long room with a flat floor and a stage with a curtain at one end. There was almost no wing space and certainly no control booth at the back as is now standard in most theatres. All technical operations were performed from the wings stage left. The lower floor was a large empty space that could be used for building and painting with two dressing rooms, one for men and one for women, on each side of the stairs that led up to the stage. There was no air conditioning, only a large fan that was far too loud to operate during the performance. The theatre itself was at street level which provided one advantage: in the case of a power failure a vehicle could be brought up to the back of the house and the headlights would illuminate the stage.
    The resident director for the season was to be Leon Major. A brilliant, talented, intense, chain-smoking young man, Leon was the first of what I liked to think of as the Big Three of undergraduate directors who went through University of Toronto at that time, the other two being Kurt Reis, still spelled with a C , and me. Kurt and Leon, both senior to me, were intense rivals, apparently despised each other, and had a low regard for each other’s work. Leon went on to a very successful career, directing at Stratford, founding the Neptune Theatre in Halifax, being the Artistic Director of Toronto Arts Productions, now CentreStage, before becoming a highly regarded opera director in the United States. Kurt Reis went on to found his own acting studio and to act in film and television. William B. Davis became the Smoking Man.
    The problem for me in the summer of 1957 was that I knew nothing about lighting, or even about electricity. I didn’t know an ohm from a watt. Before I could undertake the job I needed a crash course in both electricity and theatre lighting. Leon regularly worked with Wally Russell as his technical director and Wally agreed to bring me up to speed. By the time we moved to Port Carling I more or less had the skills that I would need for the summer.
    Once again we were doing weekly stock, performing one play at night while rehearsing the next one during the day. The schedule was efficient and Leon was a master of it. On Tuesday, the first day of rehearsal, he would give the cast his cuts; there were always cuts, and he would block the play in one day. On Wednesday, they would work Act One, Thursday, Act Two, Friday, Act Three, a run-through on Saturday, and a tech and dress on Monday, opening Monday night. And none of this rehearsing from 10 until 6 as is common now. The rehearsal day would end by 3 p.m. so the cast had time for a swim and to learn