THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994 TAG: 9406170186
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH THIEL
DATELINE: 940619 LENGTH: ROANOKE ISLAND
The Indian leader leaps into the center of the battle, his muscles taut as his bowstring as he unleashes a flaming arrow at the church altar in the English settlers' wooden fort.
{REST} It is a key scene in this year's production of ``The Lost Colony,'' an outdoor play just starting its 54th season that depicts the struggles of a group of English settlers who carved a fort out of the Roanoke Island wilderness in the late 1500s, clashed with the natives and then mysteriously disappeared.
The audience watches the fight scene - even fidgety youngsters sit spellbound - as if they are seeing the carnage when it really happened more than 400 years ago.
What the audience doesn't know is how much work went into making that flaming arrow fly for the first time when the play opened June 10 for its 11-week run, including careful testing of various chemical mixtures until one was found that wouldn't fizzle too quickly, and painstaking choreography to ensure that none of the actors actually gets hit by the burning projectile.
The arrow is the latest sign that a production which started humbly in 1937 with handmade costumes, an organist for music and virtually no special effects is going high-tech.
``We're slowly moving it into a different age,'' said Carl V. Curnutte, 29, ``The Lost Colony's'' costumer.
\ The process of transforming the outdoor play into a major-league performance, whose claim to fame now is that it's the country's longest-running outdoor drama and one of the state's biggest tourist draws, actually got started back in the mid-'60s. That's when metal towers were constructed on the slopes alongside the stands where the audience sits, said Hunt Thomas, 38, an assistant stage manager and Roanoke Island resident who has been with the show off and on since he was 5. The towers hold stage lighting.
``They've withstood some northeasters and some hurricane scares,'' said Thomas, who has done everything from acting in the play as an Indian boy to working as a sound technician.
The towers were followed by a new sound system in the mid-'70s, Thomas said, replacing an organ.
Also around that time the production staff came up with perhaps the show's first special effect - the arrows that appear to protrude from the colonists' backs after the scene when they fight the hostile Indians - now a staple of the performance.
The arrow shafts actually are pre-attached to the actors' backs, rigged to rat traps that are affixed to vests the actors wear. When the traps are tripped, by a tug of strings on the front of the vests, the arrows stand up, seeming to poke from the actors' backs.
The noise and flurry of the fight scene are distracting enough that the audience doesn't even notice the illusion.
The 1980s saw the end of another era for ``The Lost Colony.'' That's when Irene Rains, the legendary costume designer who had been with the show since it began and made most of the costumes by hand with the help of her assistants, retired.
``I remember the little old ladies that used to sit back there in that unairconditioned costume shop,'' said Thomas, whose great-grandmother worked as one of Rains' assistants.
From the beginning, the women used whatever they could find to make costumes exciting. Poker chips served as decorations on Indian costumes. Indian wigs and fringe were made from yarn. Sir Walter Raleigh's garb stood out because of bright-colored trim.
``They really used all the resources they had,'' said costumer Curnutte.
Curnutte came to the show in 1988, at the same time that award-winning New York costume designer William Ivey Long, a North Carolinian whose family had been involved in the production when he was a boy, signed on with the show.
Together Curnutte and Long began a complete, systematic overhaul of the show's 800 costumes, beginning with an elaborate new gown for Queen Elizabeth. This year the actors that play the queen's guard wear real, metal helmets, cast by a North Carolina metalworks.
The emphasis is on historical accuracy, Curnutte said, but also on giving the audience a little glamor. Colonist women's petticoats, for example, still look somewhat distressed and home-dyed, but they have color, such as bright flowers.
Yarn and poker chips have given way to glitter.
Costumes are no longer just sewn, they're ``constructed,'' Curnutte said. Some of the most elaborate ones are put together in New York. Sir Walter Raleigh's costume, for example, was replaced this year at a cost of almost $10,000, Curnutte said.
The costume shop also is gradually getting a makeover. Old sewing machines are being replaced.
The crew has designed rolling racks, which will allow costumers to air out most of the costumes every day. ``We're gradually modernizing,'' Curnutte said.
\ The crew isn't stopping there, however.
Designers of special effects, such as assistant director Robert W. Fearn and Pete Peterson, who choreographs fight scenes and plays the Indian chief who fires the flaming arrow, have more in the works.
The burning arrow ``was the hardest thing we had to come up with,'' Peterson said. They had to find a substance that would burn consistently. The answer was petroleum-based roofing materials.
Then they had to choreograph the scene so that no one would get hurt, and so that sand and water would be at the ready on stage so that actors and actresses could help put out a fire quickly if something went wrong. Finding a place to shoot the arrow that wouldn't be susceptible to the erratic Outer Banks winds also was key.
``I fire the arrow, and the only thing I worry about is that someone's going to forget and be thinking about dinner or something and run in front of it,'' Peterson said.
They also hope to liven up the big fight scene with a colonist who runs across the stage on fire like a ``human blow torch,'' Peterson said. Now, only a small section of a colonist's skirt catches fire. To pull it off, they visited the South Carolina laboratory of a pyro-technician and chemist who engineered ``The Towering Inferno,'' a movie about a skyscraper that catches fire.
The chemist perfected the use of ``cold fire,'' a substance that appears to burn, but never gets much hotter than skin temperature.
Eventually, they'd like to make the fight scene even more exciting by igniting one of the settlers' cabins on the set. That's a touchy business on a stage that's constructed of wood - old bridge material discarded by the state and soaked in creosote, a highly flammable, oil-based preservative.
The two also want to work back into the performance a fake head that was first used in 1991 during a scene when English settlers decapitate an Indian.
``People find it a little gruesome, so we've not been able to keep it in the show yet,'' Fearn said.
by CNB