Yesterday I was at the theater by myself. I took a little time to say goodbye to Bethany. We have built some beautiful sets for our plays, but I think none as stunning as that one. I just walked around and soaked it up for a bit. Being sentimental.
Monday we tear it down. That is a part that I do not enjoy. People often ask where we store our sets. We don’t. We re-use the materials for the next set, everything comes down. Certainly there are certain pieces that we save. You’ve seen the well in a variety of plays. We have some doors, tables, boulders and such that you will see reappear from time to time, but most of it comes down and apart.
But I don’t know what we’re going to do with the Lazarus Tree.
That tree has quite a story. It was a big mesquite that we enclosed in a fence behind our horse barns. We had a lot of horses at that time, and there was at least one that had a fondness for tree bark.
I didn’t think it was even possible to kill a mesquite tree, but if a horse eats all the bark, we discovered, the tree will die.
When we started building the set of the original Lazarus back in 2007, that old twisted, dead mesquite looked like the perfect tree. And it was, except that it hadn’t been dead very long, and still weighed so much that when we cut it down and tried to move it up to the theater chained to the front of our little John Deere tractor, the back wheels came off the ground.
After some pruning we eventually got it up the hill. How we got it inside and standing up…is another story. A long one. But when we did, it was just as great as we’d hoped it would be.
After the first production of Lazarus was over, we dragged it outside and it remained out in the brush behind the theater for a time. No one seems to remember moving it.
Five years later, when we were building the set for Lazarus again, it was nowhere to be found. Everyone had thought that particular tree had such personality that it was almost a character in the play. Its gnarled, bent shape mirrored the ancient Lazarus, and there was a certain menacing look, as if the devil himself was lurking there on the stage.
We searched everywhere around the theater and couldn’t find it, and I had about decided that the best thing was to try to reproduce it in styrofoam. We’ve created some pretty interesting trees over the years…but the Lazarus Tree was going to be very hard to match.
Glenn and I decided to take the truck out and see if there might be another gnarled dead tree somewhere that we could use, before we started trying to whittle one. We were bouncing through a pasture far over on the east edge of the ranch and I caught a glimpse of a branch sticking up among some stalks of dead weeds and brush.
There was just something familiar about that branch. I got Glenn to turn around and go back, and sure enough, it was the Lazarus Tree. It lay there on the ground in all its malevolent glory, ready to be resurrected and reprise its role on the stage.
It was considerably lighter this time, but even after five years of being abandoned and forgotten, the Lazarus Tree still had the goods. It could still give you a chill if you looked at it long enough.
I don’t know what we’re going to do with it this time around. It has become sort of a treasure though, so we can’t just dump it out in the pasture again.
Maybe I’ll ask Robin if she can figure out a way to use it as decoration for the men’s room.
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