Updated on July 9, 2003

The World is a Stage - And Visa Versa

As I explained in the last essay, I was now well on my way to fame and fortune as an actor. The only thing standing between me and unmitigated stardom was practice, practice, practice.

And so it began. For the first few weeks, rehearsals were held on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays for at least three hours. Before the first rehearsal, I decided I'd better actually read the play and it was then I discovered that this wasn't going to be easy. When there are only four characters carrying a seven act play, you can be mighty certain that there are no small parts. Many times throughout my life I've had a nightmare whereby I'd find myself on stage on opening night and realize that I hadn't memorized any lines, and now, leafing through the script, I was wondering if my nightmare would soon be coming true.

Imagine my surprise, then, at the first rehearsal, when Tobin, the director, told us we weren't supposed to start memorizing anything! That would come later, she assured us. For now, we would concentrate on the "blocking" - being where we needed to be on stage at any particular point in the play. In retrospect, it was a good strategy - having to memorize blocking and lines all at once would have been disaster. But using two weeks out of an already tight schedule for just doing blocking had all of us actors wondering just how bad opening night was going to be.

The difficulty of blocking was further compounded by the fact that we didn't have any elements of the set to work with - that would all come later. So, as actors are prone to do, we had to pretend. For the most part, this wasn't too difficult. But one scene called for my character, Tom, to roll around on a bed with my soon-to-be-ex-wife Beth. This is not easy to do when the "bed" is three chairs placed next to one another.

In conjunction with our rehearsals, the publicity campaign began to heat up. I'm not one to keep a high profile, so when my picture started showing up in local papers and on posters just about everywhere within a 30 mile radius of town, it wasn't the most comfortable feeling. I'll admit, though, it was fun to be recognized every once in awhile. But after a few weeks, I really started to get tired of seeing myself everywhere.

Gradually, things started to fall into place. Elements of the set started to show up (some of which we had to construct ourselves - this is community theater after all, there are no divas!). We went from reading from the script to being banned from looking at the script at all during rehearsals. The blocking started to come naturally. And then, suddenly, it was time for our first dress rehearsal, which came just three days prior to opening night.

The dress rehearsal didn't go too bad. That's not to say we were ready for opening night, though. "Not going bad" simply meant that, for the most part, we remembered our lines and where we were supposed to be. The acting was, well, still under development.

The next night we had our second and final dress rehearsal, and this time we were allowed to invite guests. We only had about a dozen people in the audience, but for the first time we were able to get enjoy audience feedback. People laughed at things we had hoped would draw a laugh. They clapped. It was real, and it was finally starting to feel like it.

Opening Night

About two and a half months after I developed the weird notion that I would try out for a play, it was opening night. The pay-off. The culmination of countless hours of work. Now, for the first time since I embarked on this adventure, I finally found myself nervous.

In truth, opening night was more like another dress rehearsal. It occurred on a Thursday night and was billed as a "sneak preview." Tickets were only $5 rather than the $12 they were for all the other shows. All this, of course, really didn't make a bit of difference in the scheme of things, but we used the justification of "they only paid $5" as a means to calm our nerves.

The Belfast Masker's theater has what is known as a "thrust stage", meaning that it is surrounded on three sides by the audience, making for a very intimate theater experience. The house capacity was 72. On opening night, about 50 people were in the audience - not the sell-out we all hoped for, but certainly more than the dozen we had acted in front of at the last dress rehearsal.

My character was not involved in the first act, so I had the opportunity to sit upstairs in the Green Room and get progressively more nervous as I listened to the first act unfolding. When at last it was my time to make an appearance, I had managed to sufficiently block out the world at large and focus on "being Tom."

And so it began. My first scene was the infamous "bedroom scene," in which Tom shows up at Beth's bedroom "just to say 'hi'," and ends up getting in a heated argument, pushing Beth around the room, and finally tossing her on the bed where the anger switches to passion as Tom tosses off his shirt and the actors embrace as the light fades. Big stuff for a theater newbie, and when all was said and done, the scene came off without a hitch. And everything got easier after that.

As you might have ascertained, my character does not come off as a particularly nice person at the start. In fact, one could characterize him as a chauvinistic pig. In later scenes, however, deeper truths are revealed and Tom is shown to have some depth after all. My job was to make this character, and his transformation, believable. I first came to realize that I was having some success when, during intermission, one of the stage crew came up to the Green Room and said "a friend of mine in the audience said she wants to kick your ass."

We gave a total of 12 performances over three weekends. Some shows were sold out, a few were sparse (Mothers Day, in particular). And no two performances were alike. I found it amazing how different the audience reactions were from night to night. Sometimes you could barely hear yourself think between rounds of laughter, other nights you could have heard a pin drop. And although it is fair to say that we definitely improved over time, it's also fair to say that we lacked consistency. With a small cast, if even one actor was "off," it had the potential to diminish the entire production.

There were gaffs and memorable moments almost nightly. One night, the other male actor picked up the wrong line, thereby jumping ahead a full two pages in the script. I was able to pick up on the muffed line without skipping a beat, so the audience members weren't aware that they weren't getting their full money's worth, but I was rather miffed because the two pages that got skipped were mostly my lines. On another night, as I was reciting a rather lengthy monologue, I heard an audience member call out to me, "Now don't go getting mad again." For a brief second I was inclined to talk back to them, but I held steady and continued with my lines. In one scene, my character was supposed to be drinking a beer which, in reality, was a Heineken bottle filled with water. One night, however, unknown to me, the stage crew forgot to put the "fake" beer in place and I was instead handed a real beer. When I first took a sip of the real thing, I was quite taken by surprise and almost spit it out all over the stage.

All in all, the run was quite a success. Even now, some two months later, I still run into strangers who feel the need to tell me "you were the guy in that play." Unfortunately, though, Hollywood hasn't come knocking so I'm going to have to keep my day job. But I'll be back!