Tis week is a departure from my boyhood stories.  I'm almost running out of them.  Only a couple or so left.  But I ran into tis one while cleaning out some files.  It's the same boy but a half a century later.  I wrote this for our local newspaper at the request of the director.

My Life as an Actor...

What do you do when you’re 63 years and recently retired?  My next door neighbor John had the answer.  He took me to our local community little theater and persuaded me to audition for a part in the next production of You Can’t Take it with You.

I decided to humor John so when the director asked me to take a script, step onto the stage and read some lines, I did just that.  I read several parts with several other hopefuls, most of them experienced in some form of acting.  Since I was the only rank amateur there I did not really expect to get a part but I figured, what the heck, it was a pleasant way to spend an evening and meet some new people.

About two o’clock the next afternoon my telephone rang.

“Hello?”
“Is this Noel?”
“Yes”
“This is Eva.”
“Eva?”
“Yes, Eva the director of the play.  You read for me last night.”
“Oh yes!”
“Would you like to play the part of Paul?”
“Sure!”
“Good.  See you at the the playhouse at 5 tomorrow evening.”
“OK,” I said as I rushed off to see my wife Betty.  “Guess what!  I’m an actor!”

When John and I showed up at the playhouse all the actors and actresses where there and we were each given one of those little blue books that I had read from the previous evening.  I had always thought that scripts were typewritten sheets but  here they were in a little book.  Paul was written on the cover of mine.  It seemed I was going to play the part of Paul.

It was the first get-together of all the cast members and we sat around and read the lines in the book.  After we finished Eva gave us a schedule of rehearsal times and dates.  It was December 12th.  The play would open on January 31st.  We would have two weeks off for Christmas.

John told me to highlight my own lines in the book with a yellow marker and my cue lines with an orange marker.  Cue lines are what another actor or actress says just before it’s your turn to speak.  I also heard some of the other actors talking about how many lines they had, so I counted mine.  I had 78 lines, more than some of the others but less than those with larger parts to play.  Some performers don’t count their lines.  They say it’s bad luck.

The following week we did what was called ‘blocking’.  Blocking is like a set of instructions that tell you where to be on stage at every moment of the play.  There were blocking instructions in the book, but on a smaller stage the book instructions don’t always fit the set, so the director has to figure out what will work best.
Before I became an actor I always wondered what exactly a director did.  Now I knew.  I would say the director is the busiest person on the set; much busier than any of the performers.  I would liken the director to a mother bird with a nest full of chicks all squawking for attention at the same time.  A director must have infinite patience and tact.

Every performer has his or her own idea of where he or she should walk, sit, stand, or whatever and doesn’t hesitate to indicate this to the director.  Then the director ether acknowledges a good idea or tactfully explains why it won’t work.  At least that’s the way Eva worked.

By the end of the week the margins of my book were full of penciled notes of blocking instructions.  We all knew, or were supposed to know, where we were supposed to walk, stand, sit, enter, and exit.  I had also learned what the terms stage right, stage left, upstage and downstage meant.

The Christmas break was upon us and as we left the theater the director reminded us to memorize our lines over the next two weeks.  Yeah, right!

The day after New Year we gathered at the theater to begin rehearsals in earnest.  It was four weeks until opening night.

The first rehearsal seemed pretty dismal to me.  We walked on and off stage like a bunch of strangers mouthing words from a book, and indeed we were, reading from our little books, scarcely looking up for fear that we would lose our places.  

But then as time progressed we began to look up from our books.  Performers began recognizing each other, and themseves, as the characters they were supposed to be.  This group of strangers was beginning to act like a family.

Sometime during the second week of rehearsal we went ‘off book’.  We couldn’t read from the script anymore.    Bt most of us still carried the book around as a security blanket.  There was a person off stage who read along from the book as we rehearsed and if we forgot a line or a word we shout out ‘line’ and the person reading would give us the next word or two.  That helped a lot.  We continued to study lines just before we made our stage entrances, but the books went into our pockets as we walked out on stage to perform.  Sometiems the director was still making changes in the blocking.

On Wednesday night we had our first dress rehearsal.  It stunk!  After the last curtain the director slowly approached the stage and said, “It isn’t going to be me up there on stage Friday night.

On Thursday night it went much better.  On this nightwe also wore makeup for the first time.  Now I have never worn makeup before except maybe when I was a youngster on Halloween.  I kept feeling like I wanted to wash my face.  But I got used to it even though I felt a little like a sissy.

Opening night!  My oh my!  I have never seen so many peole in so many stages of nervousness.  Was I missing something?  Did they all know something I didn’t?  One actor went on stage and began pacing up and down.  Another just sat backstage and said she couldn’t go on.  One showed no nervousness at all while others had their own little personal ways of showing it.  But the whole cast was supportive of each other and the nervousness seemed to be a bonding catalyst.

I didn’t feel nervous until I took my place behind my stage entrance for the first act and heard the low rumble of the audience talkng amongst themselves before the curtain went up.  We took out places on stage.  The curtain went up.  The audience became silent.  A sharp pang of anxiety hit me in the stomach for an instant.  But by the time I was to utter my first line it was over.   I said my lines at the proper time.  I stood in the right places.  I left the stage on cue.  I felt wonderful.  I had been baptized.

The real performance is when the cast truly comes together.  Someone in the audience reading a script might notice a missed line or an ad lib when one performer is reminding another it’s time to speak.  Or a late stage entrance or ext.  But the audience never notices them.

Not on stage though.  It’s amazing how a line, or even part of line suddeny become completely erased from you memory.  A few seconds of silence during a performance sends each performer on stage into a momentary state of panic as they search their brain trying to remember if it’s thier turn to saysomething.  But there always seems to be someone there who knows what’s supposed to come next and skillfully fills the silent void with a cue that seems to belong in the script.  That’s acting!

I didn’t know what the director meant when she said each performance is different Now, having been there, I realize that no two audiences see the exact same play on a stage.  And no two audiences are alike either.  While there are parts of play everyone laughs at, there are parts of a play that one audience will laugh at and the next audience will sit in silence at.  There are placees why you wonder why the audience laughed at all.

Now for the behind the scenes crew.  When I was in the Air Force the pilots were the on stage performers.   The ground crews were the stage hands.  In this play I got be one of the pilots.  But behind the stage were a crew without whom the play would never go on.

Someone had to build and decorate the set.  This would be an ongoing task as rehearsals progressed.   Each night we would go in and the set would seem to have undergone a slight metamorphosis until one night we had a beautiful house where we had only a bare stage a few weeks before.

The director and prop girl found all the things we needed for the scene to come alive..  Pictures on the wall.  Napkins on the table.  A vase on a stand.  A book.  Clothes to fit circa 1934 of ‘You Can’t Take it With You’.  

There is an assistant director who reads through the lines and blocking notes from a master script as the performers go through rehearsals.  She gives us hints and cues and generally helps us over the rough spots.  The light and sound guy is proably the busiest person during an actual performance.  His lights set the mood and his sound effects have to be right on cue.  He must follow the play line by line and step by step to make sure everything happens on time.

And the makeup artists.  They had to make up 19 perofrmers in various stages of makeup from a light skin tone in my case to full face makeup and hair styling —all in time for their various stage entrances.  And makeup repairs had to be made during scene breaks.

The greatest reward of the experience of acting in the Roswell Community Little Theater is the privelege of being part of a team ranging in age from teens to seniors in their seventies who work well together.  There was certainly no generation gap here.

During the cast party at the director’s home after the last performance the young lady who played the part of my daughter asked me if I had been ‘bitten’.  I said, ‘Bitten?”  She said, “Yeah, bitten by the acting bug.”  I told her no.  I wouldn’t have missed it for the world but I wouldn’t want to go through it again.  

Post Script...I did act again.  I was requested to play the part of a newspaper reporter trying to get the goods on a soap opera star in a play called Take a Number Darling.    The director and I had a falling out and it was a battle of personalities.  There was a scene where I was supposed to hold the rest of the players at gunpoint.  There was no stage prop gun so the director brought his own pistol from home.   I told him I would not point a real gun at a person.  He told me he would make sure the gun was unloaded before the scene and so would the prop girl.  I still refused and told him to get a fake gun.   I told him you could fill a big city telephone book with the names of people who were killed with  'unloaded' guns.  I kept the part but the animosity between myself and the director was evident throughout the rehearsals.  The cast thanked me for standing my ground.  They didn;t want a real gun pointed at them either.  But the play went on and it was my last appearance on any stage.

Next week I'll backup a half a century.

Noel

 

@birdguy

Noel, isn’t this the same story you posted before?

 

It might have ben.  I posted several stories here over the years.  I kinda loose track sometimes.

Noel