An ISTJ woman gets told she is indispensable, and the telling is sincere, and what it buys her is more of the work that stays in the building when she goes. Nobody in the room is lying. Everybody in the room is holding the door shut.
In the fall of 1994 we were teching Twelfth Night and I wanted to move on, and Sheila Bjelland would not let the room move on, and we sat there.
“It’s the same chair,” I said.
“It’s a hand upstage of the spike.”
“Nobody in that house can see a hand.”
“Malvolio can,” she said. “He puts his weight on the back of it without looking at it.”
The designer sighed the way designers sigh. The chair went back on its tape and we lost eight minutes and everybody in that room, including me, filed the eight minutes under Sheila. Two years later, on a different show with a different deck crew, a chair drifted the same distance and an actor put his hand in the air and went down on one knee in front of six hundred people and got up laughing, which is the only reason I remember it at all.
Sheila Bjelland started at Pomeroy Street in 1984. She was twenty-five, with a state-school degree and two summers of stock behind her. She was an assistant stage manager for four seasons and production stage manager from 1988, and she called something like nine hundred performances in this building before anybody made her anything. She wrote in pencil, in a hand that slants back, in a book she would not let a soul photocopy because a photocopy of a calling script is a lie about how current it is. She ate at the production table. She was the last person out of the building on a two-show day and she left the ghost light where it goes. She had a way of saying thank you at the end of a note session that closed the note session, and I watched three visiting directors learn it and start doing it themselves.
The building went up in 1911 as a vaudeville house, spent thirty years as a furniture showroom with a false ceiling nailed under all that plaster, and became a theater again in 1976 when a woman with money and a grudge bought it at auction. There are still sandbags on the fly rail that predate the counterweight system and nobody will cut them down. Every spring a pigeon gets in through the grid and every spring somebody spends a morning of paid labor negotiating with it. We are fifty years old this season, which is the reason for a good deal of what follows.
Here is what I thought about Sheila Bjelland, and I said it in interviews and I said it to the board and I believe I said it once from a podium. She doesn’t want to make the work. She wants the work to happen. Those are two different appetites and one is not smaller than the other, and this business is dishonest about that, and I took a certain amount of credit for not being dishonest about it.
I could argue it then and I can still feel the shape of the argument. Everybody in a theater has met the stage manager who wanted to direct and was terrible at it and made everyone’s spring miserable, and everybody has met the department head who got promoted out of the only thing they were good at. A person who has spent thirty years landing other people’s decisions on time is not automatically a person who ought to be making them. I used to say that the cruelest thing you can do to a first-rate anything is hand them a job they never asked for. I said it with real feeling. I thought I was protecting people with it.
I ran this theater from 1990 to the end of the 2023 season. My name is on a chair in the fourth row and on a fellowship for young directors, and there is a dramaturg named Tess Kiley, twenty-six, currently reconstructing our production history for the fiftieth-anniversary book, who has sent me the same query three times about a show we did in 2011 and who has now started copying our managing director on it. I have answered her twice, and both answers were accurate, and neither of them was an answer.
Fran Bilodeau, who ran the business side for nineteen of my years, used to end the season-planning meeting the same way once the fights were over.
“And Sheila can hold it together.”
Paper Tech
A paper tech is the meeting where the stage manager and the designers go through the script and write down every cue before a single light is hung. No actors, no theater, four people and a table. You say and then what happens, about two hundred times, and somebody writes it down, and what gets written down is what the show is going to be.
She ran ours for thirty-five years. I have sat in a great many of them and I have never once had to ask a question twice in one of hers.
What I did not understand for most of that time is that a calling script is not a plan. It is a record of decisions that have stopped being open. Every cue in it is a thing that a room settled, on a date, with people present, and the whole purpose of the pencil is that the settlement can be produced. When she said we said the fade was on his exit, not on the line, she was not disagreeing with me. She was reading me my own minutes.
We had a subscriber named Ambrose Fitch who held the same two seats from 1979 until he died in 2018, and who wrote a letter after every single production, on lined paper, mailed. Most of them were about the plays. One year he wrote to say that our intermissions had gotten three minutes longer over five seasons and that he had the numbers, and he did have the numbers, and Fran had them framed. That is the kind of thing this building collects.
Every prompt book this theater has made since 1984 is on a metal shelf on the third floor, in order, in the boxes they came in, because she put them there. There is a gap where the first eight seasons should be. Nobody has ever been able to tell me where those went and it has been a small joke here for as long as I have been here.
I inherited Sheila. That matters. When I came in 1990 I was thirty-seven and had directed in six cities and had never run anything, and she had been here six years and knew where the money and the keys and the bodies were, and for my first season she saved me roughly once a week without either of us saying so out loud. In my second season I told an interviewer from the daily paper that Sheila Bjelland was the reason this building worked. They printed it. Somebody had it laminated and it was on the callboard for years.
I asked her once whether she minded that the piece hadn’t mentioned any of the shows she’d called.
“It’s a newspaper,” she said.
Three Weeks Out
In the spring of 2001 she put a memo in my box.
It was one page. It said that she had directed twice in school and once at a summer company in 1983, that she had been reading the second-stage submissions for eleven years and had opinions she would put in writing if I wanted them, and that she would like to be considered for a studio slot. It gave three plays she thought she could do in that room for the money that room had. It was dated. It did not ask me to think about her differently.
I said yes. I want that on the record because everything after it is worse. I gave her the studio slot for the winter of 2003, and I told her to pick from her three, and she picked the smallest one, and she started meeting with a designer on her own time in the summer.
That fall the mainstage Doll’s House lost its director three weeks out. He had a heart event in a parking lot in another state and that was the end of his season and very nearly the end of him. I took the show over myself, because that is what an artistic director does, and I was directing a play I had not prepared with a company that had been working a different way for two weeks, and I was not good.
She came into my office in the middle of an afternoon — I remember the light on the carpet — and stood, because she did not sit down in offices.
“You need me in the room for this one.”
“I need you everywhere.”
“In the room,” she said. “Not on the deck. I’ll take the studio out of the winter.”
I said something about next year. She said next year, and wrote something on the pad she carried, and went and called a matinee.
She was in the room for six weeks. She fixed the second act, or made it possible for me to fix it, which at the time I did not distinguish between. The show was reviewed well. The studio slot in the winter went to a young man from the city who had assisted me twice, and it went to him because he was available and because Sheila had taken herself out, and both of those are true, and I have never once told the story with the second half in it.
Next year the season had a musical in it and we needed her. The year after that we opened the annex and we needed her. In 2007 we made her production manager, which came with the biggest raise anybody on that staff had ever gotten in one jump, and Fran and I were pleased with ourselves for a month.
She thanked me for it in the hallway outside the shop, holding a clipboard against her chest.
“Does this mean I stop calling?”
I said only if she wanted to.
“I don’t want to,” she said.
Spike Tape
Trevor Hain arrived in 2004 out of a conservatory, aged twenty-four, and she trained him for five years. He is very good. I want that on the page before anything else, because what follows is not about his merit and he does not deserve to be the villain of somebody else’s account.
He became production stage manager in 2009. He asked to direct in 2013, in my office, standing up, in about forty seconds, no memo, and I said yes before he had finished asking and I remember thinking that it was obvious and overdue. He directed in the studio in 2014 and on the mainstage in 2016. He was our associate artistic director from 2015 and he has been running a theater of his own in another state since 2020. Twelve years, door to door.
Both of them stopped rehearsals. Both of them enforced the break. Both of them told designers no on a load-in day and made it stick. I have been in the room for both.
The clearest one I have is the Cherry Orchard load-in, because they were both on that call. We were behind, and the scenic designer wanted the deck crew to work through the meal break and eat standing up on the platforms, and Sheila said no, and he came around her to me, and I backed her. On the drive home he told me she had turned his show into a work-rules problem. Six years later, different show, same designer, and Trevor said no in very nearly the same words, and the designer took it, and afterward on the sidewalk he told me that boy had a spine on him.
So in the language of this building, when Trevor stopped a rehearsal he was protecting the company, and when Sheila stopped a rehearsal she was a stickler about the break, and I could not tell you which of us started saying it that way. When he told a designer no it was because he held the line. When she told a designer no it was because Sheila’s Sheila.
I went through my season-planning notebooks the winter before last, which is a use of a winter I do not recommend. I keep the same kind, and I write names in the margins next to shows when I am thinking about who might do what. Between 1998 and 2019 her name appears in those margins nine times and every one of those nine is next to the word calling or the word cover. His appears eleven times in six years and six of those are next to a play.
There is a whole second half to this, which is what the same conduct gets a man in a building like this one, and it is not the half I am qualified to write.
The last time I saw Trevor he told me she was the best teacher he ever had and that he still hears her in his head on a bad load-in. Then he said the thing everybody says.
“That place would fall over without her.”
Nan’s Second Drink
Nan Okafor lit nine shows for us over the years and always brought her own chair to tech, an actual folding chair, from her actual car, because ours were an insult to the spine. She was in town in the spring of 2022 for a gala we threw to announce that I was leaving, and afterward six or seven of us ended up in the place across the street with the bad ceiling.
She was two drinks in and telling the Cherry Orchard story to a young lighting designer who had not been born for it, which is the one where the house lights come up on the audience at the end while Firs is still alive on the stage, and half of them are already standing with their coats on.
“That’s the best last thirty seconds I’ve ever hung,” she said. “And I’ve been dining out on it for a decade.”
I said Peter Lindahl had a wonderful instinct for endings.
Nan looked at me for a second longer than she needed to.
“Peter was in the city that week,” she said. “That was Sheila. Second preview. She came down out of the booth in the break and said the audience had started standing during the speech at the first preview and again that night, at the same line, and that if they were going to stand we should turn the lights on and make them do it in front of him.”
I said I didn’t remember it that way.
“You weren’t in the room,” she said. “Nobody was in the room. It was a preview note. Peter came back at the weekend and loved it and said so, and I had it in the plot before the opening.” She turned her glass around on the napkin. “He told the Post-Register it came to him in the dark, and I remember thinking, that’s a funny way to say Sheila.”
The young designer asked who Sheila was.
A Matinee
The rehearsal reports are in the archive on the third floor in the boxes they were always in.
The report for the second preview of The Cherry Orchard is one page, like all of them, and under NOTES / DIRECTOR it says that the house lights would come up at the top of the final cue and hold, per discussion, and it is initialed in the corner in her hand. Under NOTES / STAGE MANAGEMENT there is a line about a sticking door in the second-floor dressing room.
She wrote the credit into the director’s column because the director’s column is where staging goes. That is what the form is for. There was no other place on the page for it and it would not have occurred to her to make one.
I sat on the floor of the archive with that box for a while and then put it back where it goes, because she would have wanted it put back where it goes, and I have thought since about how pleased I was with myself for that.
In the winter of 2023 the board went off to a lodge for two days to talk about succession. Winslow Ketchum, who chaired us then and who made his money in extruded plastics and gave us a great deal of it, brought a stack of photocopies he’d gotten from a management course and went around the table having everyone say their letters out loud. It went the way those things go: a lot of laughing, two people offended, one man delighted.
He got to the senior staff, who were not there, because senior staff were not invited to a board retreat, and he did them from the sheet anyway.
“Sheila’s an ISTJ,” he said. “You can set your watch by it. Says right here, backbone of the organization.”
Somebody asked whether Sheila had actually taken it.
“She took it at the leadership thing in 2019,” he said. “It’s in the binder.”
I said something at that table about how Sheila was more than a set of letters and everyone made the noise people make, and I felt good about having said it, and I want to be precise about the timing: she was at that moment in this building calling a matinee of a play about a family losing a house.
House to Half
I kept the photocopy. I do not know why I kept it, and I have stopped explaining it to myself.
Two weeks later I went up and sat in the booth for a performance, which I had not done in years and which she agreed to with about as much enthusiasm as you would expect. The booth at Pomeroy Street is a plywood shelf behind glass with three chairs, and I took the one in the corner with the sheet in my lap and a headset on so I could hear what she heard.
Her book was open in front of her under a small light. Every cue penciled at the syllable, warned a page early, standing by six seconds out.
“House to half,” she said. “House to half, go. House out, go.”
There is an order to these habits, the sheet said, running from the one a person operates on constantly down to the ones they hardly have at all, and the ranking runs further down than any photocopy goes, which is set out where this type gets described in full. Hers was one of sixteen sets a page like that deals in, and it came with a paragraph about accuracy and duty and being counted on, which is the paragraph you would write if you had met her for nine minutes.
What the top of the order does, as the page had it, is run a comparison the entire time underneath everything else: the thing in front of you measured off a version of it you are already carrying, so that what arrives first is not the thing but the discrepancy.
At the top of the second act she said, to the deck, without any particular emphasis, that we were running forty seconds long and to watch the furniture in the third. I looked at the stopwatch clipped to her book. It was not running. She had not started it that night.
She was not remembering the show. She was watching the distance between this one and the one that had been set, and reporting the distance, out loud, on a schedule, to people who were required to act on it. That is the second habit, the one the page had ranked under the first: the private comparison converted into a decision made in public, on the clock, in front of witnesses, and then never discussed again. A cue is the purest form of it I have ever seen. Nobody thanks you for a cue. Nobody can tell you got it right. They can only tell when you didn’t.
And the ones at the bottom of the order are the ones I have made my entire living on. Walking into a room and reading its temperature and moving with it. Standing up in front of a board and describing a season that exists nowhere except in the room while you are describing it, warmly enough that people write checks against it. That is not a superior faculty. It is a portable one.
That is the whole thing, and it took me until I was seventy in a plywood booth. There is work that accumulates into a name and work that accumulates into a building. A director takes the work with him; it is in his letters and his interviews and it gets him the next job in a city he has never lived in. A calling script stays on the shelf on the third floor. The person who is best at the work that stays is the person you can least afford to move, and so the reward for it is more of it, and the compliment attached to it is the loudest compliment the business has, and there is no way up out of the compliment.
Three things turned over on me while I sat there. The chair in 1994, first, which I had told for thirty years as a story about how thorough she was, and which was a woman reporting a discrepancy to a room that had decided the discrepancy was a personality. Then the memo in 2001, which was dated, and named three plays, and priced them, and which I have since described to two search committees as Sheila mentioned it once. Then the preview in 2011: she came down out of that booth because she had seen the same audience do the same thing on two different nights, and that is not an inspiration, that is the only faculty she has ever run on, applied to the house instead of the stage.
I should stop and say the obvious thing, because pages like this one get used as lids. Nothing in this vocabulary explains being kept off a list, or hired around, or watching a thing you said in a meeting come back three weeks later wearing somebody else’s name. That is conduct. It has remedies, and the remedies sit with a lawyer or with whoever your organization pays to receive a complaint, and they do not sit with a photocopy about how you like your week arranged.
At the end of the show she gave the calls, wrote her report, and stood up.
I said there had been a thing at the board retreat, with letters, and that hers had been read out, and that I had been thinking about it.
She snapped the light off over her book.
“I know what I’m like,” she said. “I need the announcement dates from you by the fourteenth or we can’t get the mailing out with the renewal.”
The Fiftieth
In the summer of 2023 the search consultant came through and asked me, off the record, to walk her through the internal bench.
I said Sheila Bjelland was the finest production manager in this region and that we would not survive her leaving. I said she was not an artistic candidate. I said it in a normal voice at a normal volume in a glass conference room, eight weeks after the booth, and I knew what I was doing while I did it, and the reason I did it is that the alternative was a conversation in which I would have had to say what I had done to her, out loud, to a stranger who was writing.
It got back to her inside two days, the way everything in a theater gets back to everyone inside two days, and I know the hour of it, because she came up the stairs with the production report and set it on my desk and asked whether I wanted the understudy rehearsal on the first day of the week or the second, and did not look up while she asked it, and had never once in forty years asked me anything without looking up.
I said the second. That is the whole conversation. I did not go looking for her afterward and she did not come looking for me, and for ten more months we worked together on a shared professionalism I have since heard other people call admirable. I used the other stairs for most of that year. I have told myself that was the knee.
She retired at the end of the 2024 season, at sixty-five, with the party and the speeches and a card signed by two hundred and some people. Fran gave the best speech. Mine was about the building.
She calls two weeks a year for an opera company upstate now, because she likes the work and dislikes being retired, and the company sends a car for her, which she has mentioned to me twice. She is on the historical society board and has apparently reorganized their photograph collection in a way that has upset two people. Her husband Vic ran a machine shop until his hands went and now rebuilds outboard motors in a garage he keeps warmer than the house. In the spring she directed The Glass Menagerie at the community theater over in Cobden Mills, eight performances in a converted church, and I did not go.
I have three reasons for not going and I have looked at all three and none of them is any good. Here is the one closest to true: I saw her direct a staged reading in 1996, in a rehearsal hall, on no money, and I thought it was careful and slow, and I have been carrying that judgment around for thirty years as though it were evidence. I know precisely what that is worth. One afternoon, no budget, folding chairs, and a man watching who had already made up his mind. I will not dress it up. I think it and I could have gone and found out and I did not.
Tess sent the query again last month. She has now worked out on her own, from the reports, that the 2011 ending is attributed to a director who was four hundred miles away, and she wants to know what the book should say. She came in and sat on the arm of the chair in my office because I had books on the actual chair.
“I can write it two ways,” she said. “One of them is a footnote.”
I told her to write it the other way.
“The other way is a sentence in the main text that contradicts two interviews you gave.”
I told her to write it the other way.
She wanted to know then whether the production history should have a column for stage managers, since the designers have one and the directors have one, and I heard myself start to say something about the format of the book, and stopped, and said yes.
“That’s going to take me until spring,” she said. “The books only go back to ’84. Who’d know the ones before that?”
I gave her the number. She wrote it on the back of her hand, which I have not seen anybody in this building do in twenty years.
I have not called Sheila to tell her it’s coming. She would rather hear it from the person actually doing the work. That is how she is.
Tess is back on the fourteenth for the photographs.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.