The Trip to Riley

The seven of us left South Bend at 6AM in one of the University’s nicest vans to perform at the Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis. Google Maps was right; the trip only took us about 3 hours, which gave us a lot of time to kill between about 9:30 and our 11 o’clock start time. Luckily we had a few things we had to do to prepare for putting the performance in a space that we hadn’t rehearsed in.

Riley Atrium

Now this picture to the left from the Riley website is actually a great shot of the space we were working in, but as I know from experience, it’s a little difficult to interpret what you’re actually seeing. The door in the center looks like the original facade before an expansion. We weren’t sure if this was the actually the case or not, it might have only seemed like that to us because we’re used to seeing that in the stadium. To the upper left are twin glass elevators; at one point we caught a guy glued to the glass watching our show. I don’t think he knew we saw him. To the upper right you can see balconies on the second and third floors. As the woman from Riley explained to us, some of the kids aren’t allowed to leave their floors, but they were still able to watch us from up there. As you can see from the floor space shown, there really isn’t any good open performance space; the narrow part in the lower right is actually a wheelchair ramp.All the floor space you see in the picture we used as “backstage” to enter and exit from, and we performed in some relatively open space in front of that. There was a smaller triangular space on the other side of the ramp that worked pretty well for an “offstage” so we managed to utilize as much of the space we had to work with as we could. The key element of space that you can’t see in the picture is the fountain that went around two sides of the room, and added such wonderful back noise to the already challenging acoustics.

Our audience was probably about 30, but we also caught the attention of a lot of the staff walking by. Most of the kids were in the under 10 age bracket and had a staff member hanging out with them. A couple of them were in wheelchairs but for the most part they were all mobile and active. A couple of them approached us after the performance to say hi or take a picture with us. They seemed to relly like the performance, not so much the plot or the characters, as much as the fact that a bunch of people in cowboy hats were talking to them, they didn’t seem to know what was going on but they all had smiles on their faces. A lot of laughing at us more than laughing with us.

The fan favorite part of the show was by far the entrance of Buster the Evil Pig. At one point, Buster is trying to count to six, but gets hung up trying to remember what comes after three, and this kid right in front held up four fingers, hoping to jog the pigs memory. My other favorite reaction was from a very little boy, also in the front, who watched the whole show with mild interest, but during one of my lines about “Giant radioactive ants eating and smashing everything in their path and making strange noises from their antennae like AWOOOOGAH! AWOOOOGAH!” he went nuts and got super excited. It was pretty adorable. One of the most bizarre reactions wasn’t from one of the kids at all. About a third of the way through the show, this rando wandered right through the middle of our show and up the ramp, then, noticing one of the props that I had left up there, waved over the woman working there. She wanted to make sure that the staff was aware of the giant red tubes of plastic dynamite that had been so cleverly concealed in the middle of the wheelchair ramp. Luckily the staff was more amused by the woman than concerned about anything s. he wanted to draw their attention to. We couldn’t understand how she walked right through the middle of us without figuring out there was a play going on.

Overall, it was great experience, even though it felt over and done with pretty quickly. I only wish that the acoustics could have been better, but it didn’t seem to effect what our audience thought of the show, so maybe it was for the best.