$145.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-4970-7

Published: Spring 2001

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Copyright (c) 2001 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Introduction: At The Lost Colony

At The Lost Colony, performed outdoors during the summer on coastal Roanoke Island, weather matters. The weather does not always cooperate. Occasionally it rains. Sometimes it is hot and sticky. Every few years a hurricane blows through. But usually by 8:30, when performances start, the weather is tolerable. Once in a while it is perfect.

July 20, 2000, was one of those happy evenings. The morning had been overcast, but a breeze in the afternoon cleared the sky and the temperature rose to 77 degrees. Around 8:00, when people began finding their seats in the Waterside Theatre, the temperature was 75 degrees (and would drop to 70 degrees before the show ended at 10:50). Many people came in from the beaches in shorts but with pullover sweaters or windbreakers tied around their waists. The man next to me, from Long Island, was at Nags Head for the week with his wife, seated on the other side of him. She was the member of the family who wanted to see The Lost Colony. He declared himself more at home in Broadway theaters. I watched the first stars appear while dusk still held enough light to outline the stage against Roanoke Sound. In the row behind me a little girl, maybe four and wearing a yellow dress, climbed into her mother's lap and wondered when the play would begin.

The Lost Colony began in 1937. That was the 350th anniversary of the earliest attempted English settlement in North America, on Roanoke Island in 1587, and people in eastern North Carolina had long been frustrated by what seemed to them the neglect of that important event by historians and in the popular mind. Knowing the religious pageant at Oberammergau, Germany, they thought of staging a pageant themselves to raise awareness of the colony (the anniversary would provide a needed rallying point) and turned to Paul Green to write it. Green, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for the first of his several Broadway plays, was a natural for the job. Steeped in North Carolina history and lore, he had in fact dreamed of writing a play about the Roanoke colonists since his college days in the early 1920s.

Everyone associated with the project knew it was a long shot. (The sponsoring organization, the Roanoke Island Historical Association, led by W. O. Saunders, editor of the Elizabeth City Independent, and D. B. Fearing, wholesale grocer in Manteo and a state senator from Dare County, was hesitant at first about assuming financial responsibility for the production.) The question was, would people come to see the show? That is a worry anytime you put on a play, but it had real urgency when the play was on Roanoke Island. It wasn't because the area was densely populated that the Wright brothers had gone to nearby Kitty Hawk some years earlier to test their flying machines. Towns in the region were scarce (the makeup of Dare County suggests why: 300 square miles of land, 1,200 square miles of water). None of the towns at the time had a population of more than 10,000. Manteo, on Roanoke Island, its streets paved with shells, was closest to the site of the colony and the play, and home to 547 people. About twice that many lived in Wanchese, a fishing village and the other town on the island.

So, for the play to prosper, people would have to come from far away (relatively speaking). The trouble was, there was no good way to get there. A contemporary document, North Carolina: A Guide to the Old North State, complied by the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration (WPA) and published in 1939, gives details of life at the time. The route onto Roanoke Island from the north involved a ferry ride (seventy-five cents for car and driver, ten cents for each additional passenger), a stretch on something called "the floating road" (at the time — it had taken several forms over the years — a sixteen-foot-wide strip of asphalt suspended on steel cables hitched to pilings over several miles of swamp that would swallow up anything falling into it), the rest of the way on roads that were little more than packed sand. The other and easier approach to the island, from the west, consisted of miles of sandy dirt roads and two toll ferries, one across the Alligator River (so named because alligators frequented the water there), the other from Manns Harbor, jumping-off place on the mainland, a crossing of Croatan Sound that took thirty minutes. (The ferry made a round-trip every hour and a half between 7:30 A.M. and 6:30 P.M., so you might wait a while at Manns Harbor before departing for the island.)

Despite all of which, Fearing, Saunders, Green, and the rest went merrily on. A large contingent of so-called CCC boys was already encamped on Roanoke Island (men in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a forerunner of the WPA, who were building up sand dunes on the outer banks in one of the early futile efforts to stabilize those barrier islands), and Fearing got a crew of them, with mules and scoops, to work on the theater, grading the seating area and building up a stage at water's edge. Theater equipment came from the Rockefeller Foundation (an organ for musical accompaniment) and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (lights and related gear). The university also supplied the director (Samuel Selden) and several actors (numerous local residents also acted in the play, as did men from the CCC camp). Actors for the leading parts were professionals provided by the Federal Theatre Project. The U.S. Postal Department issued a Virginia Dare stamp to publicize the event, and the Treasury minted a Dare/Raleigh half-dollar, allowing the Roanoke Island Historical Association to sell the coins for $1.50 apiece to raise money.

The Lost Colony was a child of its era. At no other time could it have been gotten together in just the way it was in 1937. With its grassroots origin, community spirit, and celebratory aim, the production was precisely the sort of effort to attract national attention during the New Deal phase of the Great Depression. Paul Green recalls those early days in two essays included at the end of the present edition. The play opened on July 4 (a Sunday) with about 2,500 people in attendance, then played Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights through Labor Day. A leading drama critic, Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, gave the play an enthusiastic review during the season. President Roosevelt attended a performance on August 18, birthday of Virginia Dare, first child of English parents born in America, and the play became a cause for Eleanor Roosevelt in her efforts to enrich the lives of depression era Americans through the arts. Exact attendance figures do not exist, since record keeping was not a strong point that first season, but people managed to get there. The best estimates are that the play had an audience of about 50,000 during the summer of 1937.

The performance I saw in 2000 differed in a number of ways from the performance people saw in 1937. The four-year-old behind me that July night pinpointed one of the elements that had changed over time. In the 2000 season the show opened with the whole cast on stage, engaged in choral speaking, some lines delivered by individuals, some by small groups, key words and phrases echoed for emphasis across the stage. Even with clear articulation and good timing, which the cast displayed, such speaking wants careful listening, and the little girl, attentive only at intervals during the evening, asked her mother in more than a stage whisper: "What are they saying?" Behind the question is the history of the narrator in the play, a kind of character always full of problems in the theater.

The narrator in The Lost Colony, called the Historian, is a natural response to the demands of the play. While The Lost Colony is a play rather than a pageant in the sense that it has well-developed characters and a plot governed by its theme, not by the sequence of historical events, it is nevertheless a historical play and episodic in structure. The action transpires over a period of four to five years, 1584 to 1588, sometimes in England, sometimes on Roanoke Island, and audiences need to understand the historical situation behind the action, particularly the rivalry between England and Spain in Renaissance Europe. A narrator is an efficient vehicle for introducing historical background and for bridging the gap between episodes a few months or years or an ocean apart.

The trouble with narrators is that they are not part of the action of the play but outside it. When they speak, they interrupt dramatic momentum, disrupt any sense audiences have of being caught up in the ongoing action. So narrators tend to be a drag on performance. The history of this useful but troublesome kind of character in The Lost Colony is a story of attempts over the years to hold onto the benefits of a narrator but to minimize the character's disruptive impact. The story so far has three chapters.

Production photographs and stage directions in the first edition of the play show that in 1937 the Historian's psychic separation from the action was paralleled by a physical separation as well. What audiences saw in 1937 was "a sort of niche or alcove built into the bank at the immediate left front of the proscenium. Here as if seen through a transparent gauze is a group of fifteen or twenty men and women who constitute the commenting and interpretive chorus throughout the play. They are dressed in gray smock-like vestments. Down in the middle forefront of them and seated at a little table with a light and a great open book is the elderly historian and chorus leader who is also dressed like the chorus. He begins reading aloud . . . 'In the time of Queen Elizabeth . . .'" (1937, p. 6). For several decades nothing essential changed in the situation of the Historian. The supporting group disappeared (as did two other narratorlike characters), leaving the Historian as the sole narrative voice in the play, and his alcove (literally a three-sided cubicle open toward the audience), at first roofless and rustic, grew grander over the years. But in grandeur or not, there he sat at his table to the left of the stage as audiences view it, reading from his book, his aloofness from the dramatic action signaled unmistakably by his isolation in the cubicle.

The first consequential change in the deployment of the Historian occurred in the mid-1960s, when the cubicle was done away with and the Historian became mobile. Stage directions in a text from 1980 suggest what audiences saw during those years: "(light) comes up at the front of the center stage to disclose the historian of the occasion who stands illuminated in a circle of light. He is a kindly, elderly man, dressed in a scholar's dark robe and carries a ledger book. . . . He opens his book, glances at it and closes it. Addressing the audience: 'In the time of Queen Elizabeth the First . . .'" (1980, pp. 1-3). This is the way the Historian was handled for about three decades. Some years his costume was the scholar's robe, other years he wore Elizabethan garb or modern dress clothes. Usually, I think, he did not carry a book and addressed the audience with no pretense of reading. Whatever his costume and props, he delivered his lines from the sloping front of the stage (center, left, or right). This put him in the sight lines from audience to stage so that visually, at least, he seemed more nearly involved in the action of the play than when he was off in a side-stage cubicle.

The choral speaking of the 2000 season was introduced the season before. The basic step was to cut the Historian as a character and distribute all of his lines to characters involved in the dramatic action. Distribution was done with sensitivity to the nature of the characters. Lines having to do with the life of Native Americans, for instance, are taken by Wanchese and Manteo, principals among the Native American characters. Lines having to do with the dream of an English settlement in the New World are taken by Sir Walter Raleigh and his associates. And so forth. The lines beginning "In the time of Queen Elizabeth the First" are spoken by the Queen herself. At the opening of the play characters are disposed from one side of the stage to the other, more prominent characters occupying center stage. During the course of the play, when characters deliver lines from the Historian's speeches, they signal that they are momentarily moving beyond their own character by some physical orientation, such as walking briskly away from another character and speaking, as if delivering a soliloquy, at an angle to the audience.

These changes over time in the handling of the Historian show the impact of artistic directors on yearly productions. Joe Layton, a Broadway choreographer, began a long tenure as director of the play in 1964 and was responsible for moving the Historian from his side-stage cubicle to the forestage between the audience and the action. Drew Scott Harris, an experienced director in the current professional theater, was artistic director of The Lost Colony for the seasons of 1998, 1999, and 2000, and in 1999 introduced the choral speaking format.

The man from Long Island next to me at the July 2000 performance was better disposed toward the play at intermission than at the outset, when it seemed he had come only to placate his wife. His comment at intermission was that he had "always wondered what those Greek plays were like on stage, with their chorus and all, and now I have a sense of it." I remembered the comment when I looked back at the stage direction about the Historian in the 1937 edition, where he was thought of as the leader of a fifteen- or twenty-person group "who constitute the commenting and interpretive chorus throughout the play." Clearly, as he imagined his own play, Paul Green was thinking of those great tragedies from early Athens and how they were staged. However the Historian and his chorus were handled in the first seasons of The Lost Colony, the introduction of choral speaking in 1999 was a move in the direction of the original conception rather than away from it. In performance the choral speaking also softened the sense of suspension in the action, and of momentum lost, when the Historian's lines are delivered.

Other changes since 1937 are numerous, some made primarily to control the running-time of performances. Any production concerns itself with running-time because people can sit still only so long, but for a play done outside with a sizable number of family groups in the audience, limiting factors accumulate. Beth Stewart, associated with The Lost Colony for several years and in 2000 its production manager, told me they could not start before 8:30 without losing the effect of stage lights because of too much light still in the evening sky. And they felt they had to let out by 11:00 at the latest so families could get the children home and to bed. (In 2000, act 1 ran fifty-four to fifty-five minutes, act 2 sixty-one to sixty-two minutes. Starting between 8:30 and 8:35 and with a twenty-minute intermission, typically the play was over between 10:45 and 10:55.)

In the theater it rarely happens that scripts are too short, so control of running-time means cutting things. An example of things cut from the acting script of The Lost Colony consists of biblical allusions and folk sayings that enliven the language of Old Tom, an important comic character in the play. These sayings and allusions have been cut from the production script over the years mainly in the interest of moving the action along. Another example is the brief encounter between Sir Walter Raleigh and William Shakespeare in act 1, scene 4. The episode has been used in performance only rarely since the 1950s. A few moments of individual suffering among the colonists have also been eliminated in the final scene of the play.

The other basic reason for changes in the play over the years is that audiences change. The world today is a different place from the depression world of the 1930s. While core values may remain viable (in The Lost Colony they are love in various human relationships, courage, and an egalitarian social order), audiences bring changing experiences and expectations to the play every summer. Artistic directors can't look on the play as a museum piece, as a memorial to something grand in the past. They must deal with audiences in the here and now and make the play a moving experience for the audience that night. The Indians in the play — or indigenous people, or Native Americans — show how changing social attitudes can affect the play.

In 1937 The Lost Colony was probably ahead of most of its audience in the way it conceived the Algonquian people who greeted the first English settlers in North America. While the play accepted the historical fact of European claims of sovereignty over New World territory, it did so not without irony. The first view of the Algonquians in the play is during a harvest festival in which an elaborate dance-pantomime reaches a climax with the promise of an abundant harvest and happy future. Immediately, however, the festival is interrupted by the arrival of the English ("Somewhere in the distance the long brazen note of an English horn is suddenly blown" [1937, p. 11]), and the Algonquians are left stunned and fearful, no longer knowing what the future holds. Later texts show the Historian commenting on the pantomime and making the irony explicit (he may have commented in the first years too, without the text showing it, since it is difficult to convey precise information in pantomime). After noting that the god of the Algonquians seems pleased with their worship and promises a bountiful harvest, the Historian ominously adds: but their god "deceived them. Instead of plenteous crops and bounteous fish from the waters for the year ahead, these trusting people receive the Englishman" (1980, p. 6). A few scenes later the play makes clear the cost to the Algonquians of the English intrusion when it shows an English commander brutally slaughtering the Algonquian chief and most of his retinue.

The play also shows a romance and the makings of a marriage between an English man and Algonquian woman, the comic Old Tom and sometimes comic Agona. "That was Paul Green's slyest move," in the eyes of Drew Harris. "To make the relationship palatable by treating it on the comic level. How many people in those early audiences realized, do you think, when they felt a warm glow at the success of the relationship between Tom and Agona, that they were responding favorably to an interracial marriage? I'll bet not many."

For all that, from the perspective of 2000 the play in its early years retained vestiges of the stereotypical Indian associated with dime novels and B-movie westerns. When the Algonquians reassembled and met the English after the interruption of the harvest dance, they made themselves objects of audience laughter by the way they carried on over the trinkets distributed as gifts by the English (the Algonquian chief wore a cooking pot as a hat, and so on). When the chief was murdered by the English, the surviving medicine man expressed his grief through shrieks and wails and the flinging about of sand — actions that to the audience would seem strange, even outlandish, expressions of grief. In her single-minded pursuit of Old Tom, Agona was a parody of the lovesick female, and, as such, a frequent object of ridicule. And the Algonquians with speaking parts in the play spoke a pidgin English now called Tonto (in honor of a well-known practitioner, the Lone Ranger's faithful Indian companion), saying things like: "Wanchese have no brother. Wanchese brother Wingina — white men kill. Wanchese never forget. When moon come big white men be gone" (where Wanchese was the speaker, Wingina the chief killed by the English [1937, p. 69]).

With a rising acceptance of the humanity of Native Americans in the larger society, the stereotypical streak in The Lost Colony weakened the impact of the play on contemporary audiences. Realizing this, Drew Harris set out to do something about it. In his three years as artistic director, he eliminated the gift-giving, hence the clowning, when the Algonquians and English first meet. Audiences can now empathize with the grief of the medicine man as he cradles the head of the dead chief in his lap and moans, calling out Wingina's name in a voice of lamentation. Simply by casting her as a pretty young woman and eliminating her slapstick gestures, Harris transformed Agona from an object of ridicule to a strong positive character, whose presence adds believability to the spiritual growth of Old Tom (an important development in the play). He even created a tender moment between the two when, building on the artistic talent she always possessed (she makes candles for the colonists' chapel), Agona brings out a necklace she has made, places it over Tom's head, and gently arranges it on his shoulders.

For the only dialogue changes in the humanization of the Algonquian characters, Harris took a cue from history. Historically, the first Algonquians to learn English were two young men (Wanchese and Manteo) who returned to England with the first party of explorers in 1584 and remained there the better part of three years in the household of Raleigh before returning with the last group of settlers in 1587. These young men would have learned English not by listening to the radio or going to the movies in the 1930s but by talking with their sixteenth-century English companions during a voyage of several weeks to England, nearly three years in London, and a lengthy voyage back to Roanoke Island. Realizing this, Harris translated their speeches from the Tonto pidgin into the language spoken by the English characters in the play. Hence in the 2000 season Wanchese said: "I have no brother. Wingina was my brother and you white men killed him. This I shall never forget. Upon the full moon every white man will be gone" (2000 acting script, p. 30).

At intermission I mentioned changes such as these to the man next to me from Long Island, and he wondered if Paul Green ever altered the play like that. "Sure," I said, and told him the funny story about the death of Ananias Dare.

In the play, Dare is the military captain Eleanor White's father induces her to marry for reasons of social status despite her reciprocated love for a young tenant farmer, John Borden. Dare is killed in a battle with Indians, and subsequent events push Eleanor and John together. For audiences, a gratifying development at the end of the play is that finally, in the egalitarian society of Roanoke Island, the love of Eleanor and John is free to flourish.

In the years before World War II, however, Dare's death was not shown on stage. He was last seen leading a party of soldiers off stage in pursuit of attacking Indians. Then the Historian read out the names of the colonists killed in battle, Dare's name among them. And in those years Green occasionally got scolding letters from people disturbed — you could almost see a finger wagging — disturbed that he would show a married woman carrying on like that with another man when her husband must be somewhere about. Such behavior flew in the face of all morality, these correspondents felt, and made the play an encouragement of infidelity. What on earth was Green thinking about, they demanded — which means, of course, the letter writers had missed Dare's name in the list of those killed in battle.

Because of the war, The Lost Colony did not play in the summers from 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945, and during that time Green made several changes in the play, a notable one in the staging of Dare's death. Beginning with the reopening in 1946, Dare still led his troops off in pursuit of the Indians, but then audiences saw him stagger back on stage, an arrow clearly visible in his back as he spun and fell and expired, his head in the lap of his wife, who in a few new lines announced to the colonists — and the audience, and the world at large — that her husband was dead. For over fifty years, through the 1999 season, this very public death was made even more so by where it was played — down front on center stage right in the lap of the audience. The 2000 production, in a nod to subtlety, moved the death back to the deep right side of the stage. "But the arrow's still there," said my neighbor from Long Island when the episode came around. And there was enough staggering and exclaiming so that no one could miss the event. My neighbor was chuckling during the episode, then whispered: "Sorry. I couldn't help thinking how it came about. Usually I don't laugh when somebody dies on stage."

Just as act 2 started, the little girl behind me, looking over her mother's shoulder toward the back row of seats, called out, "Look at that man waving his arms up there!" This embarrassed her mother, but the child, unengaged with the performance for a moment and looking exactly opposite to the presumed direction, had spotted part of the support system of the show, an element of the production most people at a play know little about. Any production involves more than meets the eye of the audience (in the work of directors, designers, managers, technicians, crews, and the like). But The Lost Colony is unusual in the elaborateness of its support requirements. Doing the play outdoors brings a range of challenges related to weather that the typical regional or Broadway theater never faces. And having a cast of performers numbering around a hundred means that in scale the operation dwarfs the usual professional show, where a large cast might number fifteen to twenty and the usual cast numbers in single digits. While caught up in a performance, audience members should not be wondering how all the pieces of the show came together. Afterward, however, while savoring the experience, they might legitimately wonder. And at The Lost Colony so much goes on over the heads and behind the backs of the audience that it makes a subject in its own right.

Start with the obvious: weather. At The Lost Colony rain has been a concern literally from day one. In his dairy for July 4, 1937, Paul Green noted that "at last" the play had opened, but with the "agony of rain in first act." Any number of years later few people think of attending a performance without a question running through their mind about the likelihood of rain. How do the managers at The Lost Colony deal with this fact of life?

As her title suggests, Beth Stewart as production manager has overall responsibility for day-to-day operations. During the 2000 season I talked with her several times, and she explained to me that on the question of rain "danger, not dampness, is the issue." She is concerned for the welfare of the audience, cast, crew, scenery, and props. "We can play through light showers and nobody minds," she said. "Audiences for the most part are glad to sit it out, even reluctant to go back to the covered concession areas to wait out a shower. If it's raining more than a little bit at 8:30, we'll delay the opening a few minutes (though the whole company is in place and ready to start by 8:25 sharp, regardless of the weather). If a hard rain comes up during a performance, we suspend things a while. A hard rain makes it unsafe for the dancers and people in fight scenes, and the audience can't hear much either. So we suspend things for up to thirty minutes. But the real problem is lightning. An electrical storm anywhere about — we watch that pretty closely."

A few afternoons later I learned what she meant by "watch that pretty closely" when Tama Creef walked me through the sound and lighting setup of the show and, with the help of master electrician Matt Strampe, gave me what Matt called "Sound and Light Design 101." (Tama's title is education manager, but — though I did indeed get an education that afternoon — her title signifies other kinds of educational work, with schools, for instance, and civic groups interested in The Lost Colony and the history it commemorates.) During a performance, lights are managed from the control booth, a two-level rectangular building running parallel to the back rows of seats and several feet behind them. On the ground level of the control booth is the station where Beth and others watch electrical storms — and all other weather features too.

The station is a computer with Intellicast software that gives constant access to the Doppler radar we are all familiar with from the Weather Channel or the weather forecast on the nightly television news. At The Lost Colony the Doppler signal originates in Charlotte, North Carolina -- less than a degree south of the latitude of Manteo and 329 miles west -- and sweeps an arc that cuts across Chesapeake Bay in the north and the upper coast of South Carolina in the south. About 6:30 each evening the computer is turned on for a spot check of the weather. Experienced weather watchers can tell ground clutter from fog and haze, and storm systems with only rain from dangerous thunderheads (Doppler shows these different things in different colors). Spot checks continue through the evening unless there is something to watch, in which case the storm is monitored continuously for its size, nature, speed, and direction. "Out here on Roanoke Island most weather fronts come in from the west in the summer," Tama said. "While we get our share of storms -- and if they're electrical, we cancel and get everybody out of here -- it frequently happens that Albemarle Sound carries storms north of us. It can be raining on the beach at Nags Head and Kitty Hawk and on up toward Corolla, and we won't get a drop."

Beth Stewart and the production stage manager (in the 2000 season, David Rosenberg) make the call about delaying, suspending, or cancelling a performance. "We can't manage the weather," Beth said. "But we can manage the situation with pretty good awareness of what the weather will do. We'll know, for instance, whether we're in for two hours of rain or only a shower that'll be out of here in ten minutes. That tells us whether to cancel or just hold off a little while. And we know, if a bad storm gets out over Albemarle Sound and is still headed at us, we're in trouble. When that happens toward the end of a performance, David can speed things up and try to get us out of here before the storm hits." (Alerted by the production stage manager, the cast speeds up its delivery of lines and movement through the action, and David himself picks up the pace of cues. Rehearsals have been devoted to this quickened pace, just as football teams practice two-minute drills, so performances are smooth even if a little faster. In a play on an old theatrical label for final rehearsals, the cast calls these accelerated performances "run throughs.")

The rain policy of The Lost Colony is printed on the back of every ticket to every performance. "Performances are never cancelled before 9:00 P.M.," the statement begins. Then in bold type on a separate line: "No refunds." Followed by the pledge: "Exchanges will be granted by calling our Box Office at 1-800-488-5012." Tama, who managed the box office for several years, said that after a rain-out, between a quarter and a half of the ticket holders come back the next night for an exchange, "which can really put a squeeze on things." After that, the box office doesn't keep records on exchanges. Since the offer of exchange is good for the life of the ticket holder, not just the season in which the ticket was bought, additional exchanges dribble in during subsequent days, weeks, even years.

The economic impact of rain is easy to see if you visit Carolyn Spallino, accounting supervisor at The Lost Colony. The Waterside Theatre has been substantially rebuilt three times since 1937, each time with the incorporation of new design elements aimed at improving acoustics and sight lines for the audience. This has meant moving the center stage and the two side stages closer to the audience, increasing the angel of elevation of the seating floor, and eliminating seats -- from 2,500 in 1937 to 1,600 at present. Using her records for the 2000 season, Carolyn Spallino showed me what rain meant. "Eleven hundred, twelve hundred tickets -- anything from there to a sellout is a good night," she said. Pointing to the computer screen: "See, last Thursday, 1,182 tickets, for a box office of $15,420. Friday and Saturday nights are usually big. What if we'd had a rain-out Thursday night -- we didn't, thank goodness -- and half those people showed up the next night or two to claim their exchange? We could have been out as much as seven, eight thousand dollars for tickets we could have sold if they hadn't been exchanged."

"In recent decades you've had something like seventy scheduled performances a season," I said. "What's the record number of rain-outs?"

Beth Stewart was in the conversation and said: "Ten, in 1975. That year the cast nicknamed it The Moist Colony. Two or three rain-outs a season is the norm, but this year we're ahead of that already." (The 2000 season would experience eight rain-outs.)

If rain is a headache at The Lost Colony, financially and otherwise, hurricanes are everybody's worst nightmare. Fortunately, along the southeast coast the big month for hurricanes is September, after the play has closed (although hurricanes can do major damage in the off-season, as was the case in 1960 when a mid-September hurricane demolished the Waterside Theatre and initiated one of the major rebuilding phases). But every three or four years a hurricane makes landfall, or threatens to, in August. A threat anywhere from South Carolina to Virginia cuts down on the beach population, depriving The Lost Colony of income for weeks (people are slow about returning to the beach after a hurricane).

If the storm poses a realistic threat to Roanoke Island and evacuation is advisable, that adds a pretty penny to the cost of doing business. Cast and crew, typically about 125 people, are moved inland a safe distance, usually to the Greenville area 120 miles west, where they are put up in motels at company expense while continuing to receive contracted salaries. Such an evacuation last occurred in July 1996. The most recent bad brush with a hurricane was in 1998, when Hurricane Bonnie made its way slowly up the Carolina coast in late August. The last scheduled performance that season was Friday, August 28, but the last performance to get on was Monday, August 24. Tuesday at 6:34 A.M. mandatory evacuation of Roanoke Island was ordered. That day crews hurriedly dismantled and stored the set and equipment, then everyone was dismissed to go home. The last four performances of the season were cancelled.

Humidity, less of a drag on the bottom line than rain or hurricane, is a weather issue every night, since it strongly influences the quality of sound. At The Lost Colony sound (spoken dialogue and singing) is picked up by microphones placed in all areas of the stage and projected through a system controlled from a soundboard right behind the last row of seats. The soundboard is an elaborate version of what you have on your car radio, where with a knob or two you balance treble and base and alter the volume. On the soundboard are about two dozen equalizers (dials with numbered settings) for balancing high-, mid-, and low-range sounds from the area mikes and about a dozen faders (levers across the bottom of the board) for raising and lowering volume. To set the equalizers and faders and adjust them during a performance, a sound engineer must take into account humidity and temperature. If humidity is low, say 48 percent, with a temperature in the 70s, settings for equalizers and faders will differ considerably from what they would be if humidity were high, say 75 percent or higher, with a temperature in the 80s. Generally, the higher the humidity, the greater the demand on the projection system.

And on the cast as well. No matter how good the electronic projection system, voices weakly supported by singer or speaker sound weak. And as humidity increases, so does the difficulty of breathing deeply and maintaining breath support for the voice. Paul Laprade went into this with me one night following a performance. Music director and arranger at The Lost Colony in 1999 and 2000, Paul is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music and Westminster Choir College, and the twenty-member chorus for the play has teneded over the years to consist largely of Westminster students. Each night during the performance, he stands near the soundboard just behind the last row of seats and conducts all of the singing in the play (hymns, folk songs, and other early English music are prominent features of the production) and also the choral speaking of the Historian's lines (so he was "that man waving his arms up there" spotted by the little girl looking the wrong way). When I asked about the need for his nightly effort, he explained that speakers or singers were sometimes too far apart to stay in sync by ear. Especially was this true for the choral speakers, who did not have a musical beat to follow and relied on his beat altogether for precisely coordinated enunciation. "And humidity just makes everything harder -- breathing, projecting, hearing. Standing up here, I know what the audience hears. Let the humidity get up into the 70s or above and I slow the beat a little and start sweeping my arms down lower and lower to remind singers and speakers they must work harder at breathing deeply and projecting."

Weather even determines the kind of fireworks display the audience sees. It can be spectacular, with a quarter of a minute of booms, bangs, and whistling sizzles as rockets streak into the night sky and burst into plumes and pinwheels and globes of colored blazes that drift gently down before some of them explode again and broaden the beautiful shower. The display comes in the first act as the Queen entertains the common people of England (and the play entertains children in the audience and adults like me). But if you are sitting in the audience some night and feel a pretty good breeze in your face, you can forget about the A-1 version of the display.

On the back side of the stage is a pier extending maybe a hundred feet into Roanoke Sound, and fireworks take off from the end of the pier out over the water. Rockets are of two kinds. Titanium salutes, used at start and finish of the display, boom like thunder and explode into tight showers of white sparkles. Flights-of-three, not so loud, fill the sky with points of streaking colored fires -- red, green, blue. Out at the end of the pier, rockets sit in mortars that are themselves wired to a switchboard on the back of the set, where each launch is triggered. The pyrotechnician (in the 2000 season, Michelle Johnson) works just behind the set, not a hundred feet out over the water, so she can see the red light on a wall above her that transmits cues from the production stage manager, who controls the timing of her launches. She sets up a full array of fireworks for each performance, but wind and moisture determine how much of it, and which kinds, she can use.

The usual wind at The Lost Colony is out of the west or southwest, but occasionally it swings around to the northeast. A northeast wind blows from the ocean across the Outer Banks and Roanoke Sound directly into the theater and surrounding woods and is the wind audience members feel in their face. When I visited the backstage area, Michelle Johnson had a strip of green cloth fixed to a pole out on the pier to be sure of wind direction. Any northeast wind makes her nervous for its potential of blowing burning debris back over the audience and woods as it falls. When a northeast wind begins to call attention to itself (at The Lost Colony they judge wind velocity by the seat of their pants, but probably a velocity of six to eight knots lets a wind call attention to itself), Michelle cuts out the flights-of-three, which have much the wider spread, and launches only titanium salutes. Let a northeast wind become a stiff breeze and she eliminates the salutes as well.

Moisture in the launching mortars (as might happen if a shower came along early in the play or humidity is high) is another problem, regardless of wind direction. Such moisture causes low breaks -- rockets going up only a little way before exploding or shooting off crazily in some horizontal direction. "When that happens," Beth Stewart told me, "cast members have instructions to duck. Audiences do that instinctively." She said two low breaks occurred during the 2000 season, on nights of high humidity. Usually moisture in the mortars, like a stiff northeast wind, just causes Michelle to cancel the fireworks altogether.

In which case, she shoots off a shotgun.

I mentioned that the production stage manager could pick up the pace of a performance in the face of an oncoming storm. When I heard this, I was curious how he did it. During a performance, the PSM works out of the control booth, a two-level building several feet behind the last row of seats. On the first level are storage areas and the computer with the Doppler radar hookup. The top level, reached by ladderlike steps, is open across the front from roofline down to the top of a desk. The space is divided into two compartments, side to side. On the left side, if you are looking down toward the stage, the master electrician controls the lightboard and two electricians operate follow spots. On the right side is the PSM's desk. One night I sat in the booth with him and realized that, as far as controlling performance tempo is concerned, he is like the conductor of a symphony.

David Rosenberg, production stage manager for the 2000 season, has wide experience in the professional theater and was the person who called my attention to the way The Lost Colony, with a cast of about a hundred, dwarfs the usual Broadway or regional theater production. He made the point while telling me about the difficulties of organizing a production of that scale, starting with rehearsals. For the 2000 season artistic director Drew Harris met the cast three weeks before opening night and, with David and other associates such as music director Paul Laprade, had that relatively short time to get the show in shape (a job made doable by the fact that about a third of the cast carried over from previous years -- a typical occurrence). The trickiest part of the job in those three weeks may be scheduling scenes for rehearsal in such a way that you don't have the same actor in three places at once -- say, in rehearsal hall A for one scene, on stage for another, and in rehearsal hall B for something else, all at 9 A.M.

David's desk in the control booth is a terrible place to experience the play. You are above the focal point of the sound system speakers and hear echoes, and on a level with most of the lights so that you are as much aware of the beams as of the objects they illuminate. But it is the perfect place to look down over the audience to the stage and see everything that happens. There is even a grandeur to the view since at that elevation you can see the stage silhouetted against a wide expanse of the sound from somewhere above Manns Harbor on the mainland in the west to Nags Head Woods on the Outer Banks in the northeast. And the sky, as it darkens and fills with stars, is huge.

On the night I spent in the booth the radar showed a line of showers and thunderstorms to the west of Roanoke Island and headed our way, so people kept a close check on the computer screen from 6:30 on. David and I climbed up to his desk about 8:00, and he got things in order. He had a clipboard with a form dated for that night's performance on which he would note the minute each act started and finished and jot comments about strong and weak points in the show (for compliments or extra work). The clipboard also carried a three-column list, the columns headed "Character," "Actor," and "Understudy," with names running down two and a half pages under the headings. (Each major role has two or three understudies, and several actors understudy two or three parts.) He also had a script heavily marked up in different colors for the different kinds of cues he gives. And he had a headset that gave him two-way communication with the house manager, the soundboard operator, the lightboard operator, the left stage manager, and the right stage manager.

Just before putting on the headset, he smiled, I thought, apologetically: "You sure you want to sit through this? People think of the theater as glitz and glamour. I promise you, there's none of either in the work up here."

"Nuts and bolts," I said, "what goes on behind the scene, background -- all the things people don't think about while they watch a performance, that's what I'm after." I shifted positions in the armless metal chair and got my notebook laid out on the desk.

About 8:20 David checked with the house manager and learned that the crowd was large that night and many people were still coming in. He asked her to have the ushers hurry the seating along. Then he spoke with the two stage managers (who operate behind the scene on either side of the stage) and was told that the actors were in place and ready for the opening. A minute or two before 8:30 he announced over the public address system that taking photographs during the performance was prohibited and that the part of Father Martin in that night's performance would be played by Eric Green (an understudy). Then he told the lightboard operator to take down the houselights. In the moment of darkness in the theater, actors filled the stage, and David put down 8:32 on the time sheet. Then he said "go." Simultaneously, stage lights and accompanying music came up, and, Paul Laprade conducting, the cast raised their voices in the opening hymn.

For the rest of the evening David was mostly watching the performance carefully and calling cues. He calls three kinds: for the stage managers, for the soundboard operator, and for the lightboard operator. All the cues follow the same format: "stand by for X," then "go." In his copy of the acting script, the spot for each "stand by" is marked in colored ink (a red, green, or black X in the text with an arrow to the full cue written in a margin). His sense of timing dictates the following "go," when the cue is acted on. For the stage managers he cues the entrance of actors and special effects such as battle noises, the majestic arrival and departure of the sailing ship, and the fireworks display. So as not to confuse things, he differentiates light and sound cues by using numbers for lights and letters of the alphabet for sound (thus in his script the first of each kind is written as "L Q--1" and "S Q--A.") Light cues are the most numerous, since the lights change frequently in color, direction, and intensity to support changes of mood and focus on stage, and David's script frequently has a notation such as "Stand by L Q--27-30," followed by "27--go, 28--go," and so on.

The foul weather skipped us that night. At 9:00 someone who had been watching the Doppler screen came up to tell David the line of storms was staying north of the sound, miles from us. In a few minutes we could see tiny bolts of lightning so far away there was no trace of thunder, while overhead our sky was full of stars. So I didn't get to see a "run through" (though from watching David pace the show with his cues, it was easy enough to understand how he sped things up when need be). With a southwest wind, however, the fireworks that night were tremendous. At intermission the right stage manager called to tell David a light needed in act two had been broken during a scene shift (it was a light fitted with colored gels to simulate fire under a cook pot, with an attached smoke cone), and he sent an electrician down to fix it. The left stage manager also called to say an actor was having an adverse reaction to a recent tattoo (nauseated, I believe she said) and wasn't sure he could go on for the second act. David checked his cast and understudy list, gave her a name, then withdrew it and asked her to alert a second person when he realized the first understudy had already stepped into another role. As it turned out, the original actor was not too sick and played his part through to the end. The end came as "Stand by L Q--140. (Pause.) 140--go." House lights came up and the theater filled with applause as David put down 10:51 on the time sheet.

At that point on July 20, I was part of the audience filling the theater with applause. My neighbor from Long Island was on his feet applauding too, and vigorously. "Wow!" he said. "You won't see anything like this on Broadway. Where else can you find a great show that puts you in mind of what we're about as a country? And look at the stars! We'll be back."

I wished him and his wife a good stay on the Outer Banks and a safe trip home and made my way out of the theater with the crowd. Outside, everyone stayed on the wide path to the parking area as I veered off to the right on a narrow path through the woods for maybe a quarter of a mile to the National Park Service buildings where I had left my car. This is one of my favorite walks. By no means a wilderness such as the colonists found (the Park Service maintains low lights along the paved walk and keeps grass growing), the grounds are filled with trees -- taller pines with an understory of dogwoods, hollies, black gum, and live oaks draped with Spanish moss. You never encounter many people there and can concentrate on the smell of leaf mold and the wind soughing in the trees.

That night no one else was around, and I remembered Beth Stewart's story from her first summer at The Lost Colony, when she worked twenty-hour days as a stage manager and one night after the show fell asleep on the set. When she woke up around three in the morning, she couldn't get her bearings for a moment and was sure a crowd of colonists were there in the moonlight peering down at her in a puzzled way -- colonists, or their ghosts. I felt the presence of spirits myself that night as I walked along, spirits of the daring English people who set in motion the making of a democratic society, of the perplexed but initially hospitable Algonquian people who met them right here under trees like these, and of the people centuries later who pioneered another new thing, a kind of theater, and still work to sustain it.