Officer at Large

Recruitment Events

The two main times for recruitment events are during Fall REX/Rush in late August/early September and during CPW in April. Your job is to plan all recruitment activities and events that take place during these two times, as well as any events that may occur at other points during the year! Remember to avoid other popular or official REX/CPW events when scheduling.

Calendar

The typical year of recruitment events, listed in rough chronological order, for the past few years has been as follows, but feel free to mix it up!

REX: Activities Midway, 24 Hour Show, Theater Arts Open House
IAP: 24 Hour Show
CPW: To Be or Not to Be, Theater Games, Activities Midway, Scene Night

Remember: delegate! You don't have to manage every aspect of every one of these events yourself. Think of yourself as more of a mini-Producer/Pub Man.

During REX and CPW, you can use a spreadsheet like this one so that others can sign up to help out at non-performance events. Be sure to send this out a couple of weeks in advance and bump it consistently; also, keep in mind that people who initially signed up may have to drop out, as both REX and CPW can be quite busy for some folks.

Activities Midway

Be sure to sign up for this on time to ensure that the Ensemble gets a table. One table will do. Ask to be near other theater groups, such as the Musical Theater Guild, Roadkill Buffet, and E33 Productions.

Bring the sandwich board! Pin up posters and photos as you like. Also be sure to bring our cardboard cutout of Billy Shakes.

Make business cards! These are really easy to hand out, and you can use them to advertise both the Ensemble as a whole (be sure to include our address, ensemble.mit.edu) as well as any REX or CPW events that may be upcoming. You can get them printed at CopyTech at a convenient time and location for a convenient price. Note that their online order form is a little misleading; just be sure to make ample use of the comments section (the people at CopyTech are really nice!). Here are some cards we've used in past years. 

Set up an interest form, and bring laptops so that people can fill it out! During REX, include a poll so that prefrosh can vote for their favorite title. (In fact, it may be wise to advertise the form as "Help pick our title for the 24 Hour Show!" before it is revealed to them that the form they are filling out is actually an interest form.) The form might look something like this. Afterward, remember to go back and collect the emails to put on an Ensemble interest list. Interest lists from each year live in ensemble-interest@; add emails from the specific year to ensemble-interest-[year]@ (if this does not yet exist, make it!) and ensure that ensemble-interest-[year]@ is added to ensemble-interest@. (Remember to make ensemble-request@ the owner of any list you make!). During REX, make a note of the people interested in helping out with tech; see #11 in the 24 Hour Show section below.

During the fall, bring advertisements for upcoming auditions! Additionally, you can pull up the audition form on a laptop so that prefrosh can sign up for an audition slot right there and then.

Bring silly hats! It's traditional.

Show up on time! ASA will fine you if you don't. This will also allow you ample amount of time to set up.

Talk to prefrosh! Some things to emphasize are that we are a community of largely undergraduates who alternate hiring outside directors and having our own members and alums direct shows.

24 Hour Show

Shockingly, a 24 Hour Show takes more than just 24 hours to put on. Each of the steps below take some time to process, so be sure to plan ahead. Follow the steps below for a successful 24 Hour Show! 

1. Pick a time and reserve a room. You’ll need a room reserved for an entire Saturday. In the past we have had 24 Hour Shows at 6-120 and 4-270, depending on room availability. Any similarly sized lecture hall will do. 
2. Announce the show. Email out to ensemble@, ensemble-dartes@, and if you so choose the mailing list for the current show to tell everyone that a 24 Hour Show is happening. State where and when it will be. Remind everyone that there will be a mandatory kickoff meeting at 8pm the Friday before in the Office, and that actors will be expected at 8am the next day. 
3. Shortly after your announcement, begin an email thread for title nominations! Simply ask folks to reply-all with their suggestions. Remind people not to discuss the plot associated with any particular title, or else the title will be immediately disqualified. At this stage, you should encourage people to send in as many suggestions as possible! This usually isn’t too difficult, as members tend to get very excited about 24 Hour Shows. Keep up the hype, and the suggestions will start streaming in.
4. Close title nominations after about a week or so, and compile all the suggestions into a single form you’ll be sending out for approval voting. You may wish to clean up the titles a little for capitalization, obvious spelling errors, etc., or you can leave titles as they are—up to you! Remember to ask for people’s names, and use checkboxes to allow for approval votes. Email out the form in a new thread (people are bound to have started ignoring the title nomination thread by now) and invite all members and Dartes to vote for any titles they like.
5. At the same time, send out a general interest form to get a sense of how many actors and tech ninjas you’ll have. The form will be non-binding—after all, you can’t really know if you’re going to be working on the 24 Hour Show until 24 hours before the 24 Hour Show! So it can help to ask people to give an estimate of the probability that they’ll actually be available. Writers must be available Friday night; actors and the director should be available all day Saturday; everyone else helping will be needed Saturday afternoon. It is vehemently suggested that writers, actors, and the director are all different people. See below for a list of people you’ll need and tasks they’ll need to complete. Here’s a sample interest form.
6. Over the next week or so, based on the results of the interest form that are coming in, you’ll be able to gauge which roles won’t be hard to fill and which roles might be a little more troublesome. This is where you may need to nudge people individually to see if you can’t persuade them to fill out the roles you’re still looking for.
7. Close title approval voting a week or so after it gets sent out, and compile the top ten or so titles. The exact number of titles you’ll keep in contention is up to your discretion. Then prepare a form for the final vote. During REX, as mentioned previously, you’ll open up the title voting to the prefrosh! During IAP, title voting will remain within the Ensemble, but this means you can choose to employ a fancier voting method like ranked choice—still, however you want to count votes is up to you.
8. A couple days before the show, send out dormspam announcing the show to the general public! If you’ve never sent dormspam on behalf of the Ensemble before, be sure to check in with someone who has. Here’s a sample; note the copious amounts of question marks. 
9. Hold the mandatory kickoff meeting at 8pm Friday night before the show in the office! Be sure to send out a reminder to the Ensemble a few days beforehand that attendance to this meeting is mandatory for anyone involved, barring extraordinary circumstances. This is where you’ll announce the title (be sure to have it decided, or at least narrowed down to a couple of options, beforehand). If for whatever reason you can’t decide whether to allow one title or another from the election results, feel free to hold a vote amongst the people who show up to the kickoff meeting.
10. Now get everyone to commit to either acting, writing, directing, or doing tech. Pass around a spreadsheet like this one for everyone to fill out, and share it with the director/producer. Check in with the director/producer to make sure they know what needs to happen (see below). Remind writers to include a suggested props and costumes list as well as notes on double-casting and such. Remind actors that they should get a good night’s sleep and meet at the performance space at 8am the next morning. Then off they’ll go!
11. During the REX 24 Hour Show, invite prefrosh who filled out the interest form at Activities Midway saying they were interested in tech to come help out with the show! It can be especially cool if prefrosh can help out with lights; unfortunately, CAC now requires us to submit a plan in advance if we wish to have lighting equipment in classrooms. Still, it may be useful to look into this.

Here’s a list of people you’ll need for a 24 Hour Show:

• Writers
• Actors
• A Director
• A Producer (if this has to be the same person as the director, sad, but sometimes it be like that)
• Tech Ninjas

The Producer should ensure that the Tech Ninjas complete the following:

• Make or gather props, set pieces, costume pieces, etc.
• Prepare and run sound cues, if necessary
• Set up lighting equipment, if necessary
• Design a show image (for posters and dormspam)
• Send out dormspam
• Print and hang posters
• Design programs (you may wish to look over these to ensure they contain a blurb about the Ensemble and a link to our website)
• Print and fold programs
• Pass out programs at the door
• FILM THE SHOW

Scene Night

Start planning for Scene Night well in advance—five weeks ahead is good, or right after the spring shows’ first weekend.

Pick a time for Scene Night, and coordinate with the Secretary to book a room. We usually try to get a medium-sized lecture hall, like 3-133 or 2-190. It can help to book the room for the entire day, so that groups can rehearse in there.

Start a thread asking members, Dartes, and participants of the current show for scene suggestions. Ask people to reply-all so that everyone can see the suggestions. You may wish to recommend some guidelines for scenes: they should be 1-10 minutes long and can cover a wide range of genres and styles. Don’t worry about rights, as long as someone can find a script to work off of. 

After about a week, or when you think there are enough suggestions, compile them all into a form much like this one. It helps to include links to the script for every scene, for reference. Feel free to trim down the list of suggestions a bit at your discretion, although you can also just include them all to gauge how much interest there is for each one.

A general rule of thumb is that if one of the scenes up for consideration is a scene that the Ensemble has performed in recent memory in a mainstage show, you should check in with the people who acted in those roles originally (unless they have already graduated and left the Ensemble) before offering it to someone else if the original actors say no or don’t reply.  

Send out the form and set a deadline for people to fill it out. Once the deadline comes, you’ll have to go through the results and decide which scenes to do and who will direct them and act in them. This is the hard part. Sadly, you probably won’t be able to make everyone happy. That’s okay—just do the best you can. Here are some relevant points to keep in mind:

• Aim for a 60-90 minute show; ten scenes is okay and twelve is probably pushing it.
• Keep in mind which scenes can be cut down and which scenes cannot, and be sure to recommend these cuts to the relevant directors.
• Keep in mind which scenes are feasible in the little rehearsal time we have and which are not.
• Scenes we have done recently are easy to do if most original actors are available!
• On the other hand, if substitute actors are needed, you may need to assign a new "director" for the scene to help guide the new actors and keep the scene short. Even if no substitute actors are needed, it may help to assign one actor to be in charge of logistics for director-less scenes.
• If there’s not enough interest in a scene, don’t force it.
• If there’s too much interest in a scene, try to give the people who couldn’t get it something else to do.
• Respect people’s limits.
• Watch out for people who might be overestimating how much they can take on.
• Try to keep a balance of Shakespeare and non-Shakespeare.
• Think about who would be fun to see in which role.
• Once you’ve locked down a director, feel free to check in with them to see if they are satisfied with the cast you’re giving them, or if they have any casting ideas of their own.

In the end, use your best judgment, and don't hesitate to ask other officers for assistance or sanity checks.

Once casting is complete, send out the list of scenes, directors, and actors, perhaps like so. In your email, you should

• remind everyone when Scene Night is and when call time is (maybe 60-90 minutes before the show starts, to leave time for a transition run
• tell directors to
  • contact their actors
  • make sure everyone's using the same script
  • schedule rehearsals
• look for
  
  • a Sound Engineer, to play cues
  • a Publicity/Program Designer
  • someone to film the show
  • otherwise generally helpful Tech Ninjas

If you managed to book the performance room for the entire day, send out a spreadsheet so that directors can book the room for slots of half an hour or longer to rehearse their scenes.

You should also coordinate with the Secretary so that scene directors could request room reservations for rehearsals before the show day.

As Scene Night approaches, check in with the directors to see how their rehearsals are going, and whether they need anything! In particular, you'll need them to

• place the final copies of their scripts in a Google Drive folder, so that someone can be on book during the show if an actor needs to call line
• tell you what set pieces/furniture they'll need, and how many (hopefully just tables and chairs)
• send you any sound cues along with some non-ambiguous description of where each cue plays
• verify how they want character names to appear in the program

Once you have acquired all of this information, you're ready to order the scenes. Once again, this can be rather logistically taxing. Some things to keep in mind:

• Check if anyone needs to leave early or arrive late for whatever reason, and satisfy this requirement first.
• Do your best to avoid actors having to appear in scenes back-to-back. This will likely be impossible to avoid altogether, so try your best to ensure that the instances in which this does happen are such that:
  • the actor has few lines;
  • the actor has a break within the scene before/after they have to come on again in a different role;
  • or, if all else fails, the actor is okay with it.
• Use the furniture requirements to help you keep scene transitions smooth and easy.
• Switch around between Shakespeare/non-Shakespeare and other stylistic varieties.
• Think about what you want the first and last scenes to be. (It could make sense, for example, to begin with a strong Shakespeare scene and end with something fun.)

Email out the scene order to the directors so that they can double-check it before you email it out to everyone.

Finally, remind people to wear show shirts and dark jeans as the default costume unless they have something else their director wants them to wear.

When show day arrives, just do your best to help bring everything together. Good luck!

Theater Arts Open House

This is like Activities Midway, but at W97. There is less of a pressing need to bring silly hats. The location is more intimate, and there are snacks (yay!), and since W97 is (a) specifically the theater building and (b) so far out of the way, generally anyone who shows up is actually invested in doing theater. Therefore, use this opportunity to get a conversation going with people about what kind of theater the Ensemble actually gets up to! As well as to snack.

Theater Games

This is an hour-long event, usually head in the afternoon. Be sure to reserve a classroom for the period, leaving time for setup and clean up. It is suggested that at least two people who are comfortable with leading theater games run this event. Draw on usual Warm-Up and Morale games for inspiration. Consider separating the prefrosh into two groups if the number of people who show up become unwieldy. Bring cards to advertise your other events and the Ensemble at large!

To Be or Not to Be

This is a fairly chill, low-key event where you'll read aloud Ryan North's Hamlet-based choose-your-own-adventure book To Be or Not to Be. Encourage participation by holding vote on which path to choose; also, feel free to pass the book around so anyone who would like to can get a chance to read. While any number of Ensemble members can help out, this event really only takes one person to run. Invest in snacks!

The event is usually held in the Ensemble Office for an hour in the evening. We like to start this event at a strange time, like 10:28pm, so that it stands out on the CPW agenda. When you've reached a natural pausing point (i.e., your character arc ends!), feel free to open it up for questions about the Ensemble and theater life at MIT in general. Keep it casual, but also remind participants of the other events they can take part in! Bring cards to advertise your other events and the Ensemble at large!

Show Recruitment

Membership

The OAL keeps track of members and makes them feel loved. Make sure members are fulfilling their requirements. Read the constitution so you know what the requirements are! If membership requirements are not being fulfilled, let the other officers know.

Shakespeare Awareness

We think everyone knows who Shakespeare is. But MIT is not known for its liberal arts program. The more they remember that Shakespeare exists, the more, we think anyway, they want to join us. Give their soul to the old man. Random pictures of Shakespeare would be cool. Have fun with it.