On the road: Missoula Children's Theater

SANDPOINT — Pinocchio lied. It happened in a very small town on a very long road trip that included stops in Montana, Washington, Oregon and Idaho.

And when it happened, two young directors working for the Missoula Children’s Theater had to scramble to get Pinocchio ready to take the stage. In this case, the girl who played the lead role for the production, along with a few other older girls who also had important parts, had a conflict involving a state basketball game.

No worries, they told the directors. We’ve got a four-hour bus ride to and from the big game. We’ll all work on our lines during that time and be ready for opening night when we return.

We promise.

“The girl who played Pinocchio showed up on Thursday and she didn’t know her lines,” said Camille Perry, who is traveling the Northwest as a co-director for the play that was performed in Sandpoint last night. “They hadn’t even looked at their scripts.”

If the lead character fumbled for lines on performance night, one of the supporting players just plain froze. She, too, hadn’t used the bus ride to hone her acting skills.

“There was 30 seconds of silence,” said fellow director Donald Dilliplane. “We were trying to whisper the lines from backstage, but it didn’t help.  It happens — and the show must go on.”

For Perry and Dilliplane, it has been going on for nearly eight straight weeks. The process started at the beginning of the year with two weeks of “actor boot camp,” where they learned about working with kids and gained an arsenal of time-proven teaching techniques that have been perfected by other traveling directors for the Missoula Children’s Theater over the course of almost 40 years.

Last night’s Pend Oreille Arts Council performance of “Pinocchio” at the Panida marked the staging of the company’s longest-running play, which was first presented in 1971.

The directors started their week here surrounded by dozens of local children who turned out for an overflow audition at the Sandpoint Charter School.

“It was our biggest audition yet — 160 kids,” said Perry.

“And they were all good kids,” Dilliplane added, “so it made the casting decisions pretty hard.”

The directors managed to work 60 of the young actors into this week’s performance, but that meant another 100 kids went home brokenhearted.

“That’s the really rough part of doing this, especially when you’re working with kindergarten through eighth grade,” Perry said. “Are there tears?  Always.”

After their training in Missoula, the directing partners launched out into a performing circuit that has carried them through population centers and tiny hamlets alike — Boise, Nampa, Spokane, Caldwell and Cottonwood. Along the way, they have also spent a week in both Washougal, Wash., and Moro, Ore.

Only the town with the basketball-playing cast members came close to a crash-and-burn show, though it, too, managed to pull it off in the end. The rest, like Sandpoint, have delivered memorable performances, including one that the directors characterized as a surprise success story that took place a few weeks before the stop in Sandpoint.

It didn’t appear to be shaping up that way, however, only hours before show time. A third-grader won the principal role with a stellar audition and just got better as the rehearsals wore on. But she lost her footing when the costumes came out and the stage makeup was applied.

“The poor girl went blank on every single line at dress rehearsal,” Dilliplane explained. “We had worked with her all week and didn’t know what else we could do at that point. But somehow, she pulled it together.

“At the end of the show,” he added, “we were all hugging each other and crying.”

As they leave Sandpoint today and prepare for another audition in another new town, the directors are not quite halfway through their extended road trip, having contracted with Missoula Children’s Theater through the end of May. In terms of personal effects, they travel light. The bulk of their baggage — all of it stowed in a small pickup — is made up of the sets, costumes, makeup, props, sound and lighting equipment they haul along with them.

“Basically, anything you need to do a performance, we’ve got it in the back of the truck,” Perry said.

“We’re like a tornado that blows into town and, at the end of the week, you’ve got a show,” Dilliplane said.

It takes a certain kind of artist to survive the road for weeks on end — a task made even more challenging when you begin the journey with a complete stranger. The directors first met at the end of December and were immediately plunged into long days of training. By mid-January, they were spending every waking hour together.

“We call it our arranged marriage,” Perry joked.

Former directors had shared their own tales with the tour partners, not all of which were encouraging.

“We’ve heard many horror stories, like the ones about the home office having to change partners halfway through the tour because the people couldn’t stand each other,” Perry said. “And on the other side, I know at least four couples who met and married through Missoula Children’s Theater.”

The two directors expect their time with the company to provide a strong line item in their respective resumes. The seven-day weeks and 12-hour workdays can be grueling, they agreed, but the only real occupational hazard comes with mounting the same play so many times in-a-row. Both of them can recite the lines for 60 different characters, sing every note in their songs and step through all of the choreography.

The trouble is, they are catching themselves doing it more often as the tour progresses. In conversation, sections of dialogue or bits of song have become a kind of verbal shorthand between the two, offering something apropos for any situation they encounter.

“The hard part is stopping once you get started,” Dilliplane cautioned. “It’s when you find yourself quoting the show by accident or dreaming about it that you know it’s getting out of hand.”

Perry, who appeared in her first Missoula Children’s Theater at age 8 and long dreamed of being one of its directors, plans to hit the road with the company again this fall. Dilliplane, for his part, is looking into grad school, but would like to take up the children’s director role again in the future.

It’s the home run shows that keep them going, the two said, adding that the small annoyances like costumes that don’t quite fit and the need for perpetual repairs on Pinocchio’s collection of prop noses are easily overlooked.

“When you have a tough week, you don’t dwell on it,” Perry explained.

“Besides,” Dilliplane said, “there’s always next week.”