ON INTERMISSION

Morris shares the craft of creating the stage

A local man is on intermission and back in San Marcos after leaving New York City as a stagehand with over 20 years' experience and 26 Broadway plays under his belt –– his tool belt.

Christopher Morris, 50, is a craftsman, building stage sets that brought to life some of the biggest shows in New York’s Theater District. The San Marcos High School graduate and son of former mayor Kathy Morris just wrapped up a three-week stint stagehanding for “Wicked” at Bass Concert Hall in Austin. He’s been in San Marcos for three years with intentions of moving back to Broadway in the coming months, but as they say in the theater business, Morris is on a hold.

“I love New York,” Morris said. “It’s where I need to be because Broadway's there. It could have been in the middle of Kansas. I don't care geographically where it is. Just the size, the noise and the hustle. And I loved it. That’s where the home Broadway is. So, I had to be there.”

Stagecraft, as Morris said, is anything except the acting, and he’s done it all. From lighting, sounds, carpentry and set assemblage, his resume spans from “NBC’s Today Show,” Radio City Music Hall, the Metropolitan Opera and “Spiderman” on Broadway. But despite his forte for readying the stage, Morris said it was the appeal of acting that drew him to theater.

“I've always loved theater,” Morris said. “My mother got me into that. We would go to see shows at the Majestic in San Antonio. But one year, our family went to New York City for Thanksgiving holiday, and I fell in love with it. I went to Broadway shows and I said, ‘all right, this is where I need to be.’” After one semester at Southwest Texas, Morris set his sights on a bigger act. The appeal of building a career as an actor led him to Chicago in 1993 where he received a scholarship to attend the acting program at DePaul University. But just like the unwritten script of life that silently guides, Morris was removed from DePaul's program and looking for a place to start fresh, and that’s when New York made its casting call.

“I moved to New York in 1994 with one bag and one gun,” Morris said.

He started school at the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Brooklyn College in the acting program, being taught by actor F. Murray Abraham and poet Allen Ginsberg. While acting was initially his goal, Morris found better compensation working as a stagehand, launching him on a career spanning over two decades.

“When I moved to New York, I started acting and I got more jobs doing stagehand, stagecraft stuff, that was paying,” he said. “If you're starting out as an actor in New York City, you work for free, and I couldn't afford to do that, so I would get paid jobs in the theater as a stagehand and then that's just where it went.”

Long hours and a floating schedule make finding permanent work as a stagehand challenging. Morris said to get into the stagehand profession, one must develop contacts with other professionals that are connected to the theater business.

“I've learned in theater that it's who you know that gets you in the door, and it's what you know that keeps you there,” he said. “You got to hustle. I’m always looking for work.”

As a young man in New York, Morris took an apprenticeship test, which landed him a job stagehanding as a carpenter at the Metropolitan Opera in 1997. He said the excitement of assembling something as small as a handrail makes him feel like he is relieving and creating moments in history.

“We put together shows that the scenery is 40 years old,” he said. “You know, we've done many operas with Luciano Pavarotti who was in the original showing of this opera. And we're still using the same sets that he used when he was doing it 40 years ago.”

After the final bows were taken on March 31 at “Wicked’s” last performance, Morris helped break down the set, packed it in a truck, and watched his hard work be taken to another town.

“And that's it, it’s a bare stage,” he said. “We put this whole show together and then at the very end when we've loaded everything on the trucks, you see it again at one or two in the morning and it’s just a bare stage. It's like, 'wow, what just happened.’” Morris plans on taking online classes to get his Ph.D in theater education and moving back to New York City this summer.