What follows is a pictorial record of my building the stage for our production of The Aethernomicon at the 2008 Winnipeg Fringe Festival. I had a lot of fun with this job and hope others might enjoy seeing how it came together over time. There are probably a few cautionary tales here, too.

Your author, the handsome fellow working to the right (wait, out the window: is that . . . death?), is W&SPC Chief Intricator Asa Nodelman's brother—thus my being asked to take this on. Truthfully, I'm still pretty new to building theatrical sets: my first experience in that sort of thing was when I had taken on the role of Production Carpenter for the company's debut production, The Clock in the Lobby, only the previous year.

Virtually none of the set pieces I built for that show, however, could be reused this time around. Clock had involved rod puppets, which are operated from below by puppeteers working behind a screen; The Aethernomicon was to be a marionette show, where puppeteers stand on an elevated platform and work puppets hung from strings.

On our side was a generous grant from the Manitoba Arts council to help with construction costs. Also, I figured it was finally time to reach into my own pocket and buy a table saw. I picked up the Canadian Tire model pictured here on sale. It's really nothing fancy but certainly made it easier to make things fit together at right angles.

As this reverse-angle photograph from early in the construction process shows, there was still quite a bit of snow on the ground at the point we began. The project ended up taking probably four full months of weekends, but it was interesting throughout.

Asa and I worked out the stage design together. The overall plan was his, but I refined it a bit in terms of the structural engineering required to make it actually hold together without producing a mangled pile of lumber, cloth, and groaning actors.

The basic idea was to build a platform about three feet high, four feet deep, and twelve feet long, with supports on either side and a gap in the middle big enough for someone to crawl underneath during the play and work special effects. It would have to be strong enough for up to five people to stand on (with the area in the middle where they would stand most being unsupported, of course), high enough to give some desirable separation between puppeteers and the action below, and portable enough to be loaded in and out of a fringe venue in twenty minutes. Oy, vey.