I had the opportunity to briefly meet my first theatre mentor’s mentor earlier this week: Ray Oster is the technical director, set designer, and lighting designer at Southwest Minnesota State University where Heath Hansum, technical director and lighting and sound designer for Bucknell University (my alma mater) completed his undergraduate degree. We started chatting about a project Ray is working on related to the Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago in 1903. We’re in the run-up to tech for our upcoming production of 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and working with our local fire officials to work out some issues related to our fire curtain, and Ray’s description of the horrific events that happened on December 30, 1903 at the Iroquois Theatre made me that much more glad we’ve made it a priority to partner with fire officials to ensure we’re maintaining a safe environment on stage.

Investigations of the Iroquois Theatre fire--in which nearly 600 people died in a manner of 30 minutes--revealed that fire code regulations of the day had been blatantly ignored: the smoke doors were nailed shut, the fire curtain was obstructed, exits were unsigned and/or obscured by curtains and/or locked. Adhering to the fire code can sometimes be frustrating; this seemed a perfect opportunity to talk about three of the biggest issues that I see come up on productions, and to talk about methods for “dealing” with them: egress (and egress signs), fire breaks, and the fire curtain. It’s worth noting that these codes can’t be broken—and this blog will in no way suggest otherwise. Rather, I hope to discuss ways to consider adherence to code as challenges to be embraced, rather than obstacles to be overcome.

Egress (and those pesky exit signs)

The number of people in an auditorium dictates the number of fire exits that must be available. Somewhere, in a cramped and dark cell, in the murky basement of a nondescript government building, a team of analysts worked out the ratio of exits-to-people under the light of a single dim lightbulb using slide rules and abaci. (Maybe not!) This ratio is not arbitrary; it is based on the rate at which people can exit a room, compared to the rate at which a fire will spread given a specific amount of oxygen and fuel (related to the overall size of the auditorium). In other words, if your house has 300 seats and six exits, you need to maintain access to all six exits whenever there is the possibility of 300 people in the auditorium, because all six exits will be required to get everyone out of the space quickly. Period. No exceptions.

If you find you do need to block of an exit, because you’ve got a set that simply must extend to that area in front of that doorway, contact your local fire official! There are ways to address this, but you need to address it early in the process, or you may find yourself having to yank out the scenery opening night. (These things have happened!) Some options might include reducing the number of tickets to the performance to the limit prescribed by having one fewer exit, or to having the portion of the staging in front of the exit be quickly removable, but these options can only be pursued in consultation with the appropriate local officials.

Fire exits must be indicated through the use of “exit” signs, and there are a number of regulations related to the size and thickness of the letters and the luminosity and/or contrast of those letters. (In other words, you really can’t just go write “EXIT” in red sharpie on a piece of paper if one of your exit signs is damaged or not working!) They are bright, yes—you’re right, that often means that we cannot achieve a “true blackout.” Unfortunately, that’s the way it is: you cannot cover signs with fabric, or gel them to be less bright, or throw them on a dimmer and control them with the console. If those bright red-letters bother you, however, you can opt for the green-lettered version, which is slightly less intrusive!

Fire breaks
No, you cannot prop open the door in the stage left wing on the upstage wall. Ever. And, yes, I know it makes noise when it closes, and that it’s loud when the actors push the crash bar. However, those doors are designed to act as a fire barrier, preventing a fire from moving through the door way. This means you can’t hold it open in any way—even just a little bit, to run that data cable through there.

The walls surrounding your stage house and auditorium (as well as the proscenium itself) are also designed to be firebreaks. You can’t punch holes through them to create pass-through ports for cables, unless you completely seal those openings, restoring the fire-barrier rating of the wall. And, yes, that does mean you may not be able to easily run motor control data cables from the onstage motor drive to the control computer in the booth. You’ll have to find a better way.

Most of a technical director’s job is planning: determining how much you intend to spend on a project, how long you plan to spend on it, how you’ll build it, how you’ll install it, etc. This is an area where planning will save you a lot of grief: on day one of a project, walk around and determine if you’ll have a need to get power or data through a fire break, and develop a plan for making that happen in advance, or for finding another way of solving your problem. If you wait until the last minute, you’ll be more inclined to want to just run that cable through the doorway. (Which, by the way, is no good for the cable, either.)

The fire curtain
This is a big one; directors and designers often want to break that fourth wall and get into our audiences’ faces or create a more intimate environment for a production. However, the fire curtain represents an important fire break between the auditorium and the stage house. (One of the reasons often cited for the ridiculous number of deaths—and the rapidity in which they perished—during the Iroquois Theatre fire in 1903 was that the fire curtain hung up on lighting fixtures and was unable to descend more than halfway to the floor.) The fire curtain must be able to descend and completely close off the stage house from the auditorium.

But what happens when a raised deck crosses the fire-curtain line? As always, partner with your local officials, but you essentially have two options: a) find a way for the deck to complete the fire break for you (by extending it completely across the proscenium, and constructing a firewall with gypsum board or other materials that meets the firewall requirements in your area; or b) find a way for the curtain to descend completely, regardless of the presence of the deck. (In the March, 2011 edition of Stage Directions magazine, I wrote about one method we use that addresses the issue in the second manner.)

Furniture items represent a more thorny issue: it is certainly not uncommon to have a director or a designer who wants to put a couch, or a table, or a desk, somewhere on stage where it would prevent the fire curtain from descending. I’ve heard two different opinions on this: the first is that this is an absolute no-no; the second is that as long as a stage hand can move the furniture before the curtain comes in, there’s no problem. At Purdue, we’ve generally adhered to the idea that asking someone to remain in the building in a fire in order to move a piece of furniture seems…not quite right. However, for Spelling Bee, we’re in a situation where we have a rotating unit that, in one position, crosses the line of the fire curtain, and we’ll be working with our local officials to determine the best course of action: to move the unit (fairly difficult, given the rest of the set and the fact that we’ve already installed it), or to ask a stage hand to move it out of the way in the event of a fire.

In every case, dealing with how these code issues affect the integrity of a production starts at the beginning: designers should be aware of the code issues relevant to your performance space(s), and should design with those issues in mind. Determining early on when egress, fire breaks, and fire curtain issues might be a problem is vital to having the time to address those issues in a way that maintains the safety of our patrons and company members as well as the integrity of the production. Finally, partner with your local fire officials; in the end, we both want to achieve the same thing: a safe and enjoyable performance event.

More on the Iroquois Theatre Fire:
The Iroquois Theatre Disaster (http://www.wayneturney.20m.com/iroquoisfire.htm)
The Iroquois Theatre Fire (http://www.getnet.net/~ksup/iroquois.html)
The Iroquois Theatre Fire (Chicago Tribune: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-chicagodays-iroquoi...)

More on fire safety in theatre:
Theatre and Fire: An Unwelcome Association (http://www.stage-directions.com/index.php?option=com_content&ta...)
Fire and Safety in Theatres, A New Design Approach (https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.nfpa.org/assets/files...)