THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 20, 1994 TAG: 9406200023
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH THIEL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940620 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 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 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.
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.
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 crew isn't stopping with upgrading costumes, 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.
``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.
{KEYWORDS} PLAY THEATER LOST COLONY
by CNB