Paul Mills Holmes, known to everyone as Pablo, came to Actors Theatre during the 1992-93 season. The first Humana Festival show he stage managed was Keely and Du, which won an American Theatre Critics Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

"Jon directed it," says Pablo. "It was an amazing company. It’s a very intense play. It was only my second time working with Jon. And it was a Jane Martin play on top of it, so there was all kinds of stuff rolling that I didn’t know anything about. I didn’t need to know the politics of Jane Martin. It was work I was really proud of doing. It was as perfect an experience as I could ask for."

The show he would most like to see revived, he says, is a one-act he worked on in 1995 called Tough Choices for a New Century. "It was about disaster preparedness. It is such a funny play. It’s about this couple that teaches you how to prepare for an earthquake and all this kind of stuff and what FEMA does. He is gung-ho and she’s having none of this crap. ‘What does FEMA stand for?’ he says. And she says: ‘Few Enlightened, Many Assholes.’ Poor old FEMA," Pablo shakes his head. "Jane Anderson, I just love her writing. She’s very out there."

In those days, Actors had only two theatres: The Pamela Brown and the Victor Jory. "I think we did three shows upstairs and four shows downstairs that year," Pablo remembers. "It was a very different world than it now when we have three theatres. While it’s hectic, it’s not quite the same kind of hectic when the festival was just in the VJ and the PB. We had no shop. And scenery was packed in every conceivable corner. And in the VJ, you had to have stuff stored in the basement and bring it up on the elevator, which was the elevator for the patrons to come up in. When we were doing plays that required big scenery changes in the middle of an evening, you’d get the audience out of there as quickly as possible so we could tear it down, put it back up again and bring them back in 15 minutes."

As production stage manager, one of Pablo’s duties is putting together the "Humana Festival Bible" each January, with complete schedules for the entire period, including rehearsals, photo calls, production meetings, contact information, cast lists, daily and monthly calendars. He finds the challenges of producing in the shortened time period invigorating. It keeps everyone at the top of their game, he says. "The minute you start rehearsal on Feb. 10, the festival’s over. That’s how fast it is. You’re not aware of it, until you get to VIP weekend, and you’re at the party on Saturday night and it’s all over on Sunday. You have no idea where the time goes. The creative energy, it’s spectacular."

Unlike designers, stage managers only work on one show during the festival. "It’s really all about making sure that everybody knows about everything all the time," he says of the stage manager’s challenge. "Your communication factors are more intense. The consequences of changing this and this don’t just affect your play. They affect the other two plays, if you’re in the Bingham."

Last year, his biggest challenge was caring for The Shaker Chair set. "It was huge. It was white, white, white, white walls all the way across the stage of the PB and this incredible hardwood deck that came out and shot down into the audience," he says, showing it all with his hands. "But it weighed a ton and you couldn’t scratch it at all because it had to be pristine all the time. Trying to keep it clean was a huge effort. The other play was Pure Confidence, which had stuff that came out of the floor and things that flew in and it was huge amounts of scenery that changed in the course of the play. My walls went up and that was it. I just had light cues. Shaker Chair was a really great experience. And exciting to look at—when the design elements all come together, oh my God, it’s nirvana.

"Probably the play that I’ve had the most fun with was Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage, which was a Jane Martin play and it was the last play Jon directed here. It was a wild, wild play. More blood and guts than I have ever, ever done in my life." The farce was based on the character first introduced in Talking With, the rodeo rider Big 8, played by Phyllis Somerville. It may also have been his more distressing. "Our first preview, the leading lady fainted dead away," he recalls. "It was 19 minutes into the play. She was having a one-on-one scene with Monica Koskey. Phyllis just collapsed. Her head hit the table and then she fell on the floor. The audience didn’t quite know what to think. Jon came up to the booth. I got on the God mic and said, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ and shot down to stage. We got Phyllis up and offstage. Her blood sugar had gotten really low because she hadn’t eaten anything and she was nervous. Jon came out and, in his incredibly gracious way, explained what had happened and that everything would be fine and the audience stayed with us. About 10 or 15 minutes later, Phyllis was back on stage and got a nice round of applause."

It’s odd, he says, that such a festival would flourish in Middle America—far from the commercial theatre hubs. But he believes the location is one of its greatest assets. "This amazing city supports us like no other city I know of and it's support is unconditional. Humana gives us a bunch of money and we produce plays and they never, ever say a word. They’re supporting our artistic choices. You just don’t find that very often."

— Raven J. Railey