‘Hangmen’ stage manager Caroline Yacono finds home on the stage

Caroline Yacono prefers blurred images to hard edges.

Yacono is the stage manager of Kinetic Theatre Company’s production of “Hangmen,” in final rehearsals for an Aug. 7-24 run at the Carnegie Stage.

For the theater professional it’s the love of the stage, rather than any one particular role, that maintains her interest and keeps her motivated to continue the craft.

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Performer, lighting director, stage manager — Yacono has done it all in a career that has stretched from Pennsylvania, to New York, Florida and back to Pittsburgh — she even helped put on a Dragone show in China.

“I had to find a way to find an outlet for my different talents,” she said. “Theater is a great place for that because we have the classic arts, we have music, dance, all the performing arts. It really is a place where all of that gels.”

Yacono’s journeyman approach to her career makes sense considering the far-flung and at times circuitous route her family has taken.

Her grandmother traveled to the United States from Poland when she was just 3.

As Yacono recounts, her grandmother was one of five children living with her family in Warsaw. Her mother, Yacono’s great-grandmother, died giving birth to her youngest son.

“The family didn’t know what to do with my grandmother, so they put her on a boat to the United States with a cousin who was maybe 10 or 11,” Yacono recounted. “They sent these two little children off to the United States.”

And while much of her family died in Warsaw during the Holocaust, Yacono said her Uncle Mendel survived. Like Yacono’s grandmother, his story is one of unlikely survival. He escaped Poland on foot with his wife Rachel and 2-year-old son Adam. The family split up, with Mendel traveling alone, to increase their chance of survival. The family reunited in Russia before eventually settling in Beersheba, Israel.

Yacono’s grandmother was adopted by a family living in Squirrel Hill.

“I think there was a lot of trauma around that,” she said, recalling her grandmother’s anxiety when the topics of antisemitism or the Holocaust were brought up.

However unconventional her family’s origin story may have been, the love of music was a throughline passed down to Yacono.
“My grandmother played the piano. She had a scholarship to Carnegie Tech. My dad is a concert pianist. He went to NYU,” she said.

Talent exists on both sides of her family, she said, noting that her mother’s relatives are all fine artists.

It’s that combination — from both sides of her family — that has informed her work in the theater.

“I had to find a place in theater where I could bring all these pieces together,” she said.

As the stage manager for Kinetic Theatre’s production of “Hangmen,” Yacono is a master of all trades.

“I come to all rehearsals, make sure everything is happening on time,” she said. “There’s union cast members, so I make sure union breaks are called on time. I help Andrew [Paul, producing artistic director] on the schedule. We have a dialect coach, so I help with that. I work on the nuts and bolts of the production, including writing production notes when I go home.”

Those notes, she said, are essential. For instance, the play features an actor that stands on a bar during one scene. That detail had to be relayed to the lighting director who might otherwise not have thought of a need for a light at that particular point on the stage.

Throughout rehearsals, Yacono works not only with the lighting director but the production manager, technical director and director to make sure the production goes off without a hitch.

“Hangmen,” she said, is worth the work.

Written by Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges,” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”), the play takes place in 1965 after the United Kingdom banned the death penalty. All of England is interested in what Harry Wade, the country’s second-best hangman, thinks of the decision. Along the way a more mysterious agenda is revealed.

Despite the dark underpinnings, Yacono said the 11-person play has a lot of humor.

“There’s a lot of heavy material, but it has to be a comedy to get through,” she said. “It’s a pleasant mix of fact and fiction, based on characters that are very real characters of the day. It’s dark but it’s very funny.”

For Yacono, it’s the art and artistry that matters, especially when it’s in front of an audience.

“Anytime I step onto stage, whether it’s backstage or on stage as a performer, it’s stepping onto a home base for me,” she said. “The theater has always been home away from home, it’s where I go. It’s where I’ve always gone. When I step onto a stage, it’s stepping into a very familiar place.”

Tickets for “Hangmen” can be purchased from Kinetic Theatre’s website.PJC

David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.