'Make Me A Willow Cabin At Your Gates...'

From the middle of the wire-strewn mainstage you can spot about a dozen of them, hanging lights or spattering paint on flats, or plunging up to the elbows in papier-mache. Some are here because "I couldn't stand to look at my math homework anymore," some to get "comps"--complimentary tickets available to anyone who helps "put in" a Loeb production. Some settle down to fingerpaint the platforms and Grecian arches for two hours because they will deliver Shakespearean soliloquies from them in a few days, or because, like Peter Miller, they are the set designer.

The turnout is good, for a Sunday afternoon in the middle of midterms. People have been trailing in and out to hammer and paint all day, as they always do the Sunday before a mainstage show goes up. During that day, the Day of the Put-In, cast, crew, friends and relatives come by to act as "larries"--christened, a techie explains, after a certain person's cousin Larry, who became an institution for the time he devoted to enthusiastic but unskilled labor.

The larries do the bulk work, in this case a lot of hand smearing of stucco on elaborate stairs and platforms, a lot of painting, a lot of sealing cracks with muslin and Elmer's glue. The techies are left to chip away at details the rest of the week, assemble platforms into superstructures, dream up fanciful gels and filters for lighting--and, Thursday night, to dim the houselights and see what they have.