When I was in high school, I worked in several different professional theatre companies around Worcester. I got my start at Worcester Children’s Theatre, where I met Brian Tivnan. He hired me to be on the run crew at his company, Worcester Forum Theatre Ensemble.
Forum Theatre had their space at 6 Chatham Street in Worcester. The building originally housed the YWCA, and the black box theatre space was once a small bowling alley. The design team made creative use of the space, so you never knew from one production to the next where the stage would be, or where the audience would sit. However, the audience always entered through the door in the southeast corner, and there was a door in the northwest corner of the room that led to a small dressing room.
The problem was that depending on the configuration of the production, once an actor was backstage, they usually couldn’t leave the backstage area without being seen by the audience. And there was no toilet in the dressing room. This led to some creative solutions involving coffee cans, but no one was happy with the situation.
While there was no exit from the backstage area, there was a door in the back of the dressing room that led to an even smaller fan room. As I was often the first one to arrive, I would have to go through the dressing room into the fan room to turn on the air conditioner that cooled the theatre.
There was a small patch of sticky goop on the floor of the fan room that we usually just avoided. The space was permanently disgusting, so it never occurred to anyone to try to clean it up. But one of our actors was a handyman, and he recognized the goop for what it really was: the remains of a wax ring that had once sealed a toilet to a drain pipe. Upon hearing this news, the actors spoke with one voice: get us a toilet in here immediately.
Eliza, the managing director, took our request to the landlord. The landlord dispatched the facilities manager, Frank, to scope out the situation. Frank looked at the pipe, and scratched his head, and swore, but he was usually scratching himself and he always swore, so we discounted that. Eventually he ran a small copper line with running water into the fan room, and hooked it up to a brand new toilet.
Downstairs from the theatre space/bowling alley, there was a radio station: WICN Public Radio, still going strong today, although they have since moved to new accommodations. They had set up their massive record library in what had once been the shallow end of the swimming pool, with their offices and studio in the old locker room area.
After a few days of the actors using the toilet, the folks at WICN noticed a distinct odor. They complained to the landlord, and Frank was sent to investigate. He found his way to the room underneath the fan room and followed the drain pipe. At this point in the story, he did not communicate to anyone what he found, but simply said “It’s all fixed.”
We learned later that what he found was a drain pipe that left the toilet, continued south for about twelve feet, and ended abruptly. There had been a rag stuffed in the end of the pipe. The first flush had dislodged the rag and all the waste had landed on the floor of this sub-basement space.
Frank cleaned up the sewage from the floor and stuffed the rag back in the pipe. All fixed, indeed.
About a day later, as anyone but Frank would expect, the smell returned. This time, he bought a rubber stopper to replace the rag. All fixed.
Another day, another smell. This time he wrapped wire around the rubber stopper to keep it from coming out.
On the fourth day, the landlord asked Frank to show her what was going on. I wish I had been a fly on the wall for that conversation… there were plenty of flies by that point, but if they heard what was said, they didn’t tell.
We never saw Frank again. I can’t say anyone missed him. The new facilities manager, Dave, asked us to stop using the toilet for a while. He replaced the missing section of drain pipe with new PVC pipe, and it really was all fixed.
I wish I could say that was the last time we interfered with the radio station, but that’s a story for another day.