Some of you may remember that I have been fretting about a way to hang my backdrops and make scene changes quick and painless.  I started with four canvass drops...8' tall and 16' wide...but had no way to hang them at the theater we rent.  We considered 20' long beams, bicycle tire pulleys, toy cars..you name it.  Here's what worked:

I let the pros work on my problem by contacting Rose Brand Theater Supply in Manhattan.  I eventually bought two aluminium tracks from them....20 long and about 2" x 2" square.  They also sold me 40 carriers ( which look remarkably like one half of a toy car except the wheels are bigger and tough white plastic and, best of all, they have a suspended swivel eye to tie the drop to. The tracks are small but can hold a suprising amount of weight.  We suspended the tracks  from the ceiling at four foot intervals ( the track comes with clips that fit over the top of the track  to thread rope through) with one track upstage of the other.  The visible back wall of the stage is 18 feet wide so the track extends into the wings by a foot on each side. Across the top of each backdrop I stitched a length of black cloth 18" tall.  At intervals along the top of this cloth we attached a KWIK KLIP.  This is a nifty device I found on-line.  It is a two part black plastic clip that you can attach to a curtain or flag or tarp..whatever....the more weight that is applied to the clip ( ie: the heavier the drop) the more the clip presses closed.  It is hard to explain but actually a simple  design and it allowed me to hang the drops without all of the time consuming grommets and holes.  The best thing about the clips is that they can be moved and adjusted  easily so it was a snap to get the drops perfectly level.  I found the Kwik Klips at a company called "Sew What". 

Anyways..the clips are tied to the carriers in the track with lengths of cording about 14" and the whole thing operates so smoothly you can walk across with the leading edge of the drop between two fingers and it just whispers right along with you.  We put little end caps on the track so that the drop doesn't glide off of the end.

So we now have two tracks each of which holds two drops folded like curtains.  Three drops hang out in the wings as one is walked across for a scene change.  We attached the outer edges of each drop to the stage so that the entire thing can't follow you all the way across.

All of the hardware including tracks, carriers, suspensions clips, and end caps cost about 320.00.  The kwik klips ( I bought forty...ten for each drop) were about 35.00.  This seemed like a lot of money to me...particularly coming at the very end of all the expenses of this show ( we open on Friday the 4th and had to pay our rent yesterday) but in the long run I think I would have spent as much on wood and plastic pipe and toy cars and duct tape not to mention the beer to drown my sorrows in when it all didn't work.  Now we have a system that we can use again for future productions and it is expandable ( we can add pulleys and even automate it) but most important of all it kicked us up the ladder a little towards being a "real" theater company.

I can't wait to wrap this show so I can start the drops for the next one (Othello...I can see Venice now).  The one thing I learned is that next time I will make the drops taller than 8'.  Sewing a strip of black cloth along the top of all of those drops was very hard work and next time if I make the drops taller and just paint the top two feet black we will have the same effect.

Thanks for all of your advice on this show...it really looks great.  My costumes and backdrops are my best yet and if the actors carry as much energy into performance as they had in rehearsal  we'll all  have something to be proud of.

I'll post some photos when I have some time....