By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer

AUBURN – Only 45 minutes before the curtain rose, the lights went out.

The director paced while the actors put on their costumes and the line to the box office grew.

Inside the Great Falls School, where the Community Little Theatre was about to perform “I Hate Hamlet,” the lighting system simply winked out.

The show would have gone on without the master control, a computer programmed to adjust the stage lights to the play’s 100 lighting cues. Like the ceiling lights in a living room, the house lights would come on.

It never came to that.

Lighting designer Richard Martin managed to restart the computer by stuffing a pencil beneath a broken switch.

Since that show earlier this summer, the Community Little Theatre has purchased a $20,000 replacement lighting system.

It arrived Thursday at the Great Falls School, where it still sits in unopened boxes.

Meanwhile, the theater company is almost halfway through a fund-raiser aimed at paying for the new system.

About $9,000 has been raised so far. When the company’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof” begins performances on Thursday, audiences will be greeted with a giant light bulb and the fund-raising tally.

“We were not keeping up with the industry,” said Martin, a longtime director and vice president of production for the theater company.

And there was no way to update the old system, made by a company in Hollywood that is defunct.

“You can’t repair it nor replace it,” Martin said.

And there was never any talk of making due without the lights. They are integral to putting on any performance, creating a subtle division between the audience and the story being enacted on the stage.

“Without the lights, the magic is gone,” Martin said.