The unseen artistry of Adam Ehret
Editorial
When you leave Minneapolis for an extended time – say, nine months –you expect that the world will move on without you. Things change. But when I returned to the Twin Cities after my first year of grad school, I was met with some pretty halting news: Adam Ehret had died. Back in December. He was 30.
I was stunned.
Stage management, almost by definition, defies celebrity. Actors, directors, and designers are congratulated for work that makes a splash, but stage managers are what make the most lavish yachts sail smoothly through the night. They bring an unseen order to chaos ¬ the best art happens because of good stage management, not in spite of it.
So it’s with a dark sense of propriety that this young stage manager’s death slipped under my radar. A quick Google search revealed only Adam’s modest obituary in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, but I eventually learned that friends had staged a memorial service on the Minnesota Centennial Showboat.
As far as I’m concerned, though, his was a career deserving to be in print.
My first, best impression of Adam came during my time at the University of Minnesota, working on the Minnesota Centennial Showboat in Saint Paul. We were deep in rehearsal for a Sherlock Holmes melodrama and, understandably, Holmes and Watson carried the vast majority of the action. It’s an actor’s perfect nightmare: entire pages of go-nowhere dialogue under the direction of a relentless dialect coach, flanked by song-and-dance entertainment breaks (standard Showboat fare) and two fewer weeks of rehearsal than everyone would like. The process quickly reached a fever pitch and, on our second stumble-through, I imploded. Although his eye needed to be in many places at all times, Adam picked up on my state and immediately called a break. I’ll always remember that he didn’t ask if I was okay or “what I needed,” he simply walked up to me and said “go take a walk, come back in twenty minutes.” I later learned that our dialect coach began spewing venom about how poorly she felt the process was going and disappointed she was with the performers, and Adam rose up and defended each us as individuals. To this day, I’ve never had a stage manager go to bat for me as an actor like Adam did then.
Okay, so Adam was a nice guy and a good friend, but was he a “professional?”
“Oh yeah,” responds Jeremy Jones immediately, “In music, the phrase is that you ‘show up and play the gig,’ and that was Adam.” Jones, Manager of Company and Development at The Guthrie Theater, first hired Adam as Assistant Stage Manager to the BFA Guthrie New Plays in 2006. When 2007 rolled around, Adam was Jones’ first choice for Stage Manager. “Adam was very human. As a producer, I need to field tough conversations that fall outside the rehearsal room, and Adam always had a good sense of humor and an easy way of explaining the situation.” Jones blinks once and stares through the small lobby table, sitting with what he’s just said. I can see this loss resonates on many levels still seven months later: personal, professional, in some ways Adam’s mentor, in some ways Adam’s dependent. It’s profound. “I mean, I had no problems letting him lead a rehearsal.”
Hold. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the full gravity of that statement. The guy three degrees removed from the head of the organization that arguably puts Twin Cities theatre on the national map had no problem leaving a proto-unionized cast and a heavily unionized space in the hands of a twentysomething stage manager? That’s huge.
Jason Allyn-Schwerin, Technical Director at Penumbra Theatre, sums up his feelings much more bluntly: “There’s a void here that I don’t think will ever be filled.” I learn that Adam wore many hats during his four years with Penumbra Theatre: Administrative Assistant, Deck Manager, Carpenter, Travelling Company Manager, Actor (playing the role of Stagehand in I Wish You Love). But what made Adam a “professional” for Penumbra’s Assistant Technical Director Tim Gross was his drive to independently produce the holiday show The Match Girl’s Gift on the Showboat for the last three years, under the name Cerulean River Productions. “That was all out of his head,” Gross explains, “He knew what he wanted and went for it, and got it.” For Gross, that’s what it came down to, in whatever role Adam found himself in. “You have to want it,” he repeats. Allyn-Schwerin nods his head and continues: “There’s this ‘it,’ and you can’t learn it, you can’t teach it, it’s just there. And Adam had ‘it.’”
It’s strange - the reverence Adam’s peers give him for his talent offstage parallels the reverence actors give to other actors for their talent onstage. A humanity underlying how one works. Desire as a necessary ingredient. An ethereal “it” that even the best collegiate programs can’t deliver. And the list goes on:
Both Jones and Allyn-Schwerin make note of Adam’s keen eye for procedure. For Jones, who needs to navigate AEA and IATSE on a daily basis, respect for procedure gives him confidence as a producer. For Allyn-Schwerin, the director of Penumbra’s shop (which also juggles work for Theatre Latte Da, Mill City Opera, and the Ordway), development of procedure means an efficiency, where “there came the point no communication was really needed.”
They also both call out Adam’s capacity for self-improvement. “Adam was the only person I knew who improved from year-to-year,” Jones explains, “He streamlined his own process.” The freelance nature of his career became one of Adam’s biggest assets. “I’ve hired other people who have plateaued, frankly, but Adam would learn something from one of his other contracts and bring that back to his work here.” I can almost hear the smile in Jones’ voice.
Jones puts patience as Adam’s best quality, but he’s also quick to laud Adam’s sense of authority. I found this an especially compelling (and perhaps telling) balancing act. At Penumbra, Adam’s relationship with the rest of tech would vary depending on his role; in the shop, he was just one of the guys and answerable to Allyn-Schwerin, but through load-in, tech week, and production, Stage Management suddenly trumps Tech. “We knew two Adams, definitely,” Christine Esterl, Penumbra’s other Assistant Technical Director, chuckles, “Shop Adam and Backstage Adam.” All three praise his ability to navigate within the chain-of-command, and to effectively communicate which “Adam” he was currently working as.
Lastly, Adam could be a source of education. When Allyn-Schwerin brought his daughter’s Girl Scout troop to see Cerulean River’s The Match Girl’s Gift on the Showboat, Adam happily led an impromptu hour-long backstage tour and talk-back for the girls. Esterl nods: “Adam had this great ability to convey to people with no theatre knowledge what he was doing and why.” Jones talks about education in a different light: “Adam could create a formal space for actors to be actors.” He’s speaking about Adam’s unique position of working with young artists in conservatory-style training, and using his rehearsal process to facilitate an educational experience. “I think he impacted more artists’ lives than he knew,” Jones adds.
Lindstrom, Minnesota, Adam’s hometown, apparently didn’t know either. Dayna Jean Wolter, Adam’s coproducer for Cerulean River Productions, says the small Lindstrom church was packed to capacity for his open casket funeral service. “You had folks from the University [of Minnesota] and the Guthrie and Penumbra just slamming this poor little church,” she recalls. The official funeral was arranged quickly after Adam’s death and in the middle of the Christmas season, so Wolter arranged an additional memorial service on the Showboat in early January. Wolter’s connection to Adam was deep, joking that they “were almost like a domestic couple.” I ask her how she believes Adam was a “professional,” and it kicks off a long conversation on selfworth, passion, pragmatism, and technique. She closes, however, with this: “We’re all capable of creation, but there are only those of us who are brave enough to try.”
Wolter’s comment has stayed with me the most throughout all my interviews. Forget “professional;” did Adam bring an artistry to his work? Was my stage manager friend actually, by definition, an “artist?”
Adam certainly had all the eccentricities of an artist’s death. Adam’s good samaritanism during an early December blizzard resulted in him dislocating his knee, the same injury he had suffered twelve years before. While bedridden, he was working his way through all the Star Trek canon films in anticipation for Star Trek into Darkness, while folding programs for The Match Girl’s Gift. Behind the scenes, though, blood clots from his knee had found their way to his lungs, and eventually to his heart. Adam died on December 21, 2012, the same date the Mayans claimed the mothership was coming back for us. Contracts with Carnival Cruise Lines and Children’s Theatre Company were the last gigs Adam was offered. “Liking” AxMan Surplus was Adam’s last activity on Facebook. And when the coroner needed a family contact to proceed with her job, the only name Adam’s social circles could remember was “Spud.”
And don’t forget: he was the star in his final show, and it played to a packed house.
“He passed away too soon,” Jones muses, and can ultimately only describe Adam as having “a higher calling.” Christine Esterl would concur with that. “He had interests in all aspects of theatre,” she says, “For instance, I have no interest in being backstage. Like, I want to build scenery and that’s what I want to do. He wanted it all, the whole company.”
“I think that’s one of the most tragic things about the professional career that he’s never going to have achieved,” Allyn-Schwerin chimes in, “I mean, he was a good stage manager, but I think about where he was going to be ten years from now or maybe even less. With all the different stage managers that I’ve worked with, very few have had what he had.” Wolter, instead, balances the spiritual and the pragmatic with an almost deadpan efficiency: “It was his time, and it sucks.”
Few of us working in Minnesota theatre (backstage, onstage, what-have-you) come from already theatrical families, meaning we inevitably face a “coming out” to our friends and family. We kick at the ground, avoid direct eye contact , and wind up saying something along the lines of “I’m making a stab at this, your patience and understanding sure would be nice.” But it’s important for our non-theatrical circles to recognize that quiet moment when amateurism finally gives way to professionalism, when our place in a meet-you-at-the-pub society finally evolves into a fully fledged industry career. Theatre stopped being a simple pastime for Adam long ago, and the community had begun to turn to him as someone who could get the job done, and get it done right. That’s the takeaway I want to make sure his family (and the internet) always understands: that Adam was and still is mourned not only as a friend, but as the finest in his field.
And I take great solace in knowing he never had to suffer through Star Trek into Darkness.
