Setting the stage Without Gary Plouffe’s work in the fly gallery, audiences at Into the Woods wouldn’t see the forest or the trees By: Ben Waldman Posted: 7:00 PM CST Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2023

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This article was published 10/01/2023 (617 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Gary Plouffe can lift an enchanted forest into the sky.

And he does it without the assistance of magic, just by virtue of his access to a few classical tools of engineering: levers, pulleys, counterweights and every single muscle in his upper body.

Plouffe is the house stagehand at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, and as such, plays a key role in the constant transformation of the setting during any production at the mainstage. But unlike the set pieces he raises and drops from his perch in the fly gallery, Plouffe is invisible to the audience sitting on the other side of the proscenium.

He works behind, around and above the scenes.

Plouffe is tall, burly and jovial, with a long grey ponytail that flicks behind him as he struts gently across the catwalk. His domain is the fly gallery, where he controls a precisely and intricately organized series of cables, each connected to different elements of the set down below.

On the other end of each line from those elements is a stack of bricks, its weight calibrated to counter the heft of the pieces of the set itself. With a combination of grace and tension, those working the fly gallery must lower each element to the ground and raise it back to the rafters without making so much as a sound.

“It’s a bit of an artform in itself,” Plouffe says.

On Into the Woods — Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical flight of fancy and fantasy, which runs to Feb. 4 at RMTC — Plouffe is the giant at the top of the beanstalk, controlling set designer Gillian Gallow’s forest, inspired by the Brothers Grimm and Arthur Rackham, the Victorian artist who in the early 20th century illustrated dozens of the Grimms’ folk tales in his nimble ink and pen.

Plouffe is an old hand in the stagehand game. In his high school theatre days in St. Boniface, he was uninterested in acting, gravitating instead to a different line of work.

“The teacher said, ‘We need someone to work the lights and the sound effects.’ I said, ‘Oh, I could do that.’”

At 17, Plouffe started working at Théâtre Cercle Molière, where his future came into focus.

“I walked into the control booth, and I saw the soundboard and all the faders and knobs and I went ‘Ahhhhh. This is it. This is what I want to do.’”

Plouffe plied his trade for decades and, several years ago, began working with RMTC as a casual. Now in his sixth season as the house stagehand, Plouffe has his art down to a science, and his science down to an art.

Across the base of each of the 65 arbours, Plouffe writes the stage element that corresponds to each of the respective flies. He has developed over the years a system of colour-coded and mnemonic cues to help him identify quickly which cables are associated with what.

A cable connected to a thicket of trees is marked as No. 3 because tree sounds like three. Alliteratively, cables on the right are marked with red tape. Blue tape corresponds with cables on the left. Plouffe’s reasoning for that is that the left side of a boat is called port, and port and blue have four letters each. If it works, it works.

A few days before the first production, he quietly navigates the fly gallery, walking gingerly across a carpeted strip of floor.

“The sign of a good (stagehand) is that you have to do things quickly, but with finesse,” Plouffe says. However, even seasoned veterans are not immune to clumsiness. During the orchestra rehearsal for Into the Woods, a particularly heavy set piece landed squarely with a thud.

“The flies on this show are intense. We really built a magical forest that is ever-changing,” he says.

To do Plouffe’s job requires strength: the cast bricks are awkward to lift with one’s hands, but to Plouffe, they’re nothing. The bricks weighing down the cables at Rainbow Stage, where he works in the summers, weigh about 1 1/2 times more. “So this is a real treat,” Plouffe says, laughing.

“This is my happy place,” he says, leaning his left hand on a nearby railing. “It’s quiet. There’s a lot of hurry-up-and-wait. You can sit in your chair and read a magazine.”

During the show, Plouffe’s vision of the stage is obscured. But from the technical gallery, he is able to see slivers of the crowd and hear their response.

If he is doing his job, nobody ever notices he’s even up there.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

Ben Waldman
Reporter

Ben Waldman covers a little bit of everything for the Free Press.

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