A Love Letter

There's an episode of the fantastic Canadian television show SLINGS & ARROWS (a parody of the Stratford Festival), in which the opening night of KING LEAR is cancelled because the actor playing Lear is out, doped up on morphine (details not worth going into here, but watch the show). The Cordelia and one of the other young actors are commiserating at the bar with two of the older character actors in the troupe. One of them says something to the effect of, "You have to have a few horror shows to go along with the good ones. Then, later on, you'll have stories to tell. You'll have had a life!" I remember being so moved by those words (which were more eloquent in actuality than in my recollection), because they attest to the gypsy spirit of theatre people - you go on, you go on, you go on. You measure your life by what role you were playing at the time. As the Brits would say, there is just one thing that should keep you from going to work on a given night: "Only death. Your own."

I'd just gotten back to New York from a really difficult gig when I watched that episode of S&A, and it called to mind what we'd been repeating all summer when something ELSE, so horrible as to be funny, would happen: "One for the memoirs, darling, one for the memoirs!" Let's just say that working with a cow as a scene partner is DEFINITELY going in the autobiography.

Last night, we had a FANTASTIC show. The audience was really with us, and was having a ball (in a comedy - farce, especially - the audience gives you SUCH a boost, and when they're enjoying it, you don't have to work quite so hard). We went back to the cast house, and were all having dinner and our post-show wind-down, still buzzed by how much fun we'd had on stage. I asked Sarah, the actress playing Bertha, to please tell us ANNIE 2 stories. Now, there are certain shows that you hear about, even years later, that have become infamous - CARRIE being the most well-known example. ANNIE 2 (subtitled HANNIGAN'S REVENGE) is one such show. It was amazing to sit around the kitchen table, eyes wide, and listen to her recollect horror story after horror story - how amazing the script was at the first reading to how it was destroyed, lewd things that were said to her, Dorothy Loudon's understudy having to go on without a single rehearsal and her lines written on poster board in the pit, crying children, weeping mothers, one actor who you'd know was about to go up on his lines because he'd sort of twitch by blinking three times - really and truly unbelievable stuff.

I love that I've worked enough to now have some stories of my own to tell - some of them wonderful and fun, some of them hilarious, some of them absolutely AWFUL (Summer of the Cow) - and can't wait to accumulate more. It brings SLINGS & ARROWS to mind...you've had a life! A life in the theatre. Is there any richer kind?