TW: mentions of abortion
When your production calls for a fake abortion to be done on stage, it helps to know a thing or two about the blood.
Will it stain the stage? Will it look right under the stage lights? Can the crew get it to spurt consistently for multiple productions?
In this scenario, it’s all fake and for the production “Dry Land,” which is coming out later this semester.
As the production manager for the theater arts department at Long Beach State, Ashley Boehne Ehlers has to know about everything that goes into a production. This includes how much it will cost, whether it is safe for the cast, crew, and the audience, and if it stays within the mission of the theater.
Theater production managers are responsible for coordinating just about every aspect of a production while making sure it falls within the budget and the materials the theater already has.
Boehne Ehlers grew up in the small town of Carlyle, Illinois and had originally wanted to be a touring stage manager. With no kids and no husband, it seemed like an easy choice. That changed when she got to graduate school and started to work with younger members of the theater community.
According to Boehne Ehlers, seeing the younger crew’s hard work pay off and how rewarding it was to them, made her realize that she wanted to work in educational theater.
Boehne Ehlers is engaged to marry Brian Dauterive, who also works in educational theater as the technical director for Golden West College.
Even though the production manager doesn’t always have the final say on whether something makes it into a show, they’re the ones that have to recognize when the chosen option isn’t the right one and it needs to be changed.
“There’s that trial-and-error process,” said Boehne Ehlers. “As for our floor, ‘What color floor are we gonna do? How are we gonna seal it?’”
In the case of the upcoming production of “Dry Land,” production managers have to also consider if the fake blood they use can be cleaned up as part of the performance too.
“Making sure, because then there’s a scene where the janitor mops it up, live on stage. So, it has to be washable, cleanable up, after that scene,” Boehne Ehlers said.
For production managers like Boehne Ehlers, safety is the top priority. The goal is to keep the safety at the forefront and then balance the budget of the production around that.
The biggest challenge for a production manager is scheduling. Throughout the course of a plays run, production managers have to schedule everything from the nights the play will run, costume fittings and tech rehearsals and schedule the day that someone will go to the store to buy a five-gallon bucket of fake blood.
“Our time management skills are pretty great,” said Boehne Ehlers.
If the priority for a production manager is safety, then having the stage safety coordinator as an office mate makes the production process more efficient.
Tony Martinez fills the role of safety coordinator at CSULB and works closely with Boehne Ehlers.
“She [Boehne Ehlers] is more organized than anybody I’ve ever known,” said Martinez. “She’s always on the top of her game and always keeps us in line.”
Boehne Ehlers cites her mother as her main role model. But when it comes to her work ethic and how she operates as a production manager, she thinks of her uncle, Craig Koehler, a retired homicide detective for the Illinois State Police.
“If it’s predictable, it’s preventable,” Koehler would say to Boehne Ehlers as she was growing up.
Due to the nature of the job, production managers don’t always have close contact with the cast or stage crew. However, since Boehne Ehlers also teaches stage management classes at CSULB, she still gets to work closely with the students in the theater arts department and help them improve their craft.
“She’s [Boehne Ehlers] there for us when we need her, but typically there is that hierarchy of people that we go to,” said Sydney Barton, an actor in “Twelfth Night,” a play that Boehne Ehlers is overseeing and a student in one of Boehne Ehlers’s stage manager classes.
Barton spoke of a situation just after they got accepted to CSULB where Boehne Ehlers gave them an assistant stage management position for a production of a play called “Move.” But when the stage manager couldn’t make it, Barton had to step up.
“She [Boehne Ehlers] gave me a brief rundown on what would be expected of me that week, and I thank her a lot for that,” said Barton. “Although I am primarily an actor, I am also very interested in stage management and production, and she definitely helped me feel more confident in my abilities to do that.”
If you enjoy shaping young creative minds, doing safety checks on backstage riggings, or even choosing between different types of fake blood, take a class with Boehne Ehlers in theater arts and see if production and stage management is the right future for you.