Name: Noel Williams
Position: Cleaning crew, “Blue Man Group”
Years: Three years
Q. You clean the stage after the Blue Men are done wreaking havoc on it. Tell us about the state it’s in and what you have to do about it.
A. It’s quite a mess with the paint and paper and Captain Crunch, and once it gets onstage it all sticks together. It just seems impossible, if you stand and look at the stage, you’d think there’s no way, and we can get it immaculate by the time the next show starts. My job entails cleaning the shaving cream from the fractal screen and hosing down the stage, spraying all the stuff that goes into the grates, squeegeeing the water off the stage.
Q. How many people do the cleaning after each show?
A. The crew typically consists of between three to five people. There’s more crew members on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, because we can get it down faster if we’ve got a lot of people on stage. It’s kind of a strange little ballet, a dance of movement that happens.
Q. Do you use special cleaning equipment to get the job done?
A. The equipment is vacuums, squeegees, and really heavy bristle brooms that literally scrape stuff off the stage. There’s no brushing anything off with anything easier, because it’s a stage that’s made to hold things in place, and unfortunately it holds Captain Crunch and paper in place [laughs].
Q. I watched you sweeping off the stage, and you were pushing hard. How do you keep up with such a physically demanding job?
A. I do a lot of physical theater, thank God, but I have to say we have some other members of the crew who are bigger and stronger than I am. I’m literally throwing my whole body on top of a broom, and being small, it doesn’t go as far. Luckily, I love doing really physical things. I feel it keeps me in shape. I’ll sometimes be sore from cleaning the stage.
Q. You’ve got a short period of time between shows to get everything done. Have you ever run out of time and not had the theater cleaned?
A[Laughs]. When I first started working, I was vacuuming up the front of the stage, and you stand on the floor where the audience is and drag this heavy wet vac to vacuum up all the Captain Crunch. I got to the very end, and the wet vac falls over and dumps out everything that I just got cleaned up in the audience area. Happily enough, we had eight people who jumped on it and got it cleaned up in five minutes. Or somebody will actually spill a thing of paint on a stage. It’s amazing the type of teamwork that’ll happen if something like that happens.
Q. Do you clean up after every show?
A. We have a rather large staff, and there’s only a few staff members who don’t work more than one job. I’m wardrobe, and I work as a management support, and then as a concierge, and a lot of the other members are house staff or box office and they’re on another crew position as well. Sometimes they’re working triples, but not only cleaning. I think there’s only two or three people who work on staff and do nothing but cleaning.
Q. What was your background before joining the “Blue Man” crew?
A. I was a graduate from Virigina Tech and the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in California, and I’ve studied in Europe and what not. When I finished dell’arte, I decided that if I was going to take out that many loans to study theater, the theater was going to have to pay for it, and I’ve kept it so far.
Q. How’d you get on the cleaning crew in the first place?
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A. One of the graduates from dell’arte became employed at “Blue Man” and said why don’t you come up to Chicago from Virginia, there’s an opening here on the cleaning crew. It was a lot of fun actually. I was so ready not to ever have a desk job or telemarketing job again. I was very happy to be scrubbing a stage. I still am, it’s a lot of fun. If I were cleaning toilets, it might be different, but cleaning up paper and paint and Captain Crunch is a lot of fun because you know where it came from. It came from this great theatrical experience.
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“Blue Man Group” continues its open-ended run at the Briar Street Theatre, 3133 N. Halsted St. Performances are 8 p.m. Mondays, Wednesday and Thursdays; 7 and 10 p.m. Fridays; 4, 7 and 10 p.m. Saturdays; 3 and 6 p.m. Sundays. For tickets, call 773-348-4000 or 312-902-1500; or visit www.blueman.com.