Live Theater Comes to Google
Everyone thinks that Google employees devote 20% of their time to their passions, and isn’t that wonderful? Gmail started out as a 20%; everyone’s heard that.
It’s part of the mythology around Google, and it would be nice if it were true. Once I was at a table with 8 or 9 engineers, and I asked “who here has a 20% project?” One hand went up. Most people never had one, because their regular jobs take up 100% of their time.
The other inhibiting factor, by the way, is that most humans don’t have any passions or hobbies, and that’s almost as true for Google employees as for the general population. However, there were (and are) a lot of non-work activities going on, and those were the best part of being there for me. I’ve written other posts about the Cinema Club that I started, and the authors whose talks I hosted (also this).
Google had already had musical events, like Carlos Santana
and the most famous ukelele player in the world, Jake Shimabukuro:
Politicians, like John McCain:
and much more. But the one thing no one had done was live theater! It was my ambition for years to finally do that. But how? There were conference rooms, like the one where we showed our movies on Thursday nights, but those are set up for meetings and talks. They don’t have dressing rooms, you can’t easily set up scenery, and most of all, people are using them all day, every day, so any changes you make will probably end up getting destroyed by someone. In the Cinema Club we found that the video and sound systems got messed up nearly every week.
Our room, Asilomar, for the movies (in the 1900 building, if you know the Mountain View campus), would have worked, but it had a lectern at the front with mic, power, and other things that a meeting needs. The lectern had cables running out the bottom into a big hole in the floor, and the only way to disconnect would be to cut them. That was not going to happen, needless to say.
Finally I had an inspiration: why don’t we just turn it on its side, and make it part of the set?
Now to find a real theater company and interest them in expanding their audience. The Pear Avenue Theater was just down the street from us, so I called them up and two of them, Diane Tasca and Robin Braverman, came over to check out the venue.
The Venue
Asilomar had theater seats, steeply ramped, so that was ideal. It held about 100 people; more than enough.
Asilomar also had an emergency exit, normally locked from the outside. Could we use that for actors’ entrances and exits? Maybe, but usually the door sets off an alarm if it’s propped open. I had to talk to Security to disable that.
The indoor exit actually had an anteroom, which was great! You enter the door from the hallway, and you’re in a little room that’s still separated from the theater. Actors could enter and exit stage left OR stage right!
There were bathrooms just opposite the inside door, which the actors could use for dressing rooms.
Lighting was fairly decent for a business conference room, although nowhere close to what a real theater offers.
The Show
What about the show? Most theatrical productions take up two to three hours. That would be a problem in the middle of a workday, and they couldn’t really do it in the evening because that’s when they do their regular shows.
However, every year The Pear puts on a collection of very short plays, called Pear Slices. This year one of them was actually written by a former Googler
!
And We’re Live
So here it is. You can see me on the right briefly, before I let Diane do the introduction:
Some other screenshots from the show
: