Jitters

There is a nightmare I have even though it has been nearly twenty years since I graced the stage, but it's always the same.  I am waiting for the curtain to rise and the director announces, "Due to circumstances beyond our control, we are changing tonight's opening night from Hamlet to King Lear." The cast does not seem to be bothered by this last minute change except me, because I do not know my first line in the play and with the curtain seconds from rising, I pull out a script and start to cram. As the lights come up and I see the ghostly face of the audience just beyond the proscenium, I realize I have no idea what my opening line is.  I stand there frozen in a fear only a true actor will ever know as I wait for the promoter to give me my opening line, but when I glance out of the corner of my eye, I see the promoter's chair is empty.  I am on my own.  As the silence suffocates me, my jitters turn to complete terror. My mouth is open, but no words can come out.  The audience is getting restless and impatient.  For those who don't know this common nightmare among performers is known as "the actor's (or actress') death."  It is most common the night before opening night.

Acting is not a normal human experience, because as humans we are taught to avoid stressful situations and besides combat, acting is one of the most stressful situations a person can put him or herself in.  And it is also the choice of the person to put themselves in it.  Speaking in front of strangers is the most feared thing a person can do including facing death.  A lot of people would rather face combat where there is a chance of the person being killed than to speak in front of people.  I do not find this comforting in the least as I have been backstage in the green room, which is a name not a color choice, and listened to people vomit due to the jitters. Spencer Tracy once said, "All acting is, is remembering your lines and not to bump into the scenery."  

Good to know adding yet another dimension to the jitters, not to bump into the scenery or have a prop fail.  In this dark corner of my fear are the times when a prop, though tested many times, failed.  One example comes to mind when playing Judge Wargraves in Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians where after revealing his ghoulish plot to kill all the others, he is shot by a man he thought he has killed.  The protagonist stood up and fired twice as the script said.  Neither blank fired, but being the true actor I was taught to be I fell to the floor dead, hoping Agatha would be proud.  

There have been worse, much worse.  While living in North Carolina before enlisting in the United States Air Force, there was The Old Courthouse Theater.  In Concord they built a new modern courthouse and were going to raze the old building creating a large parking lot, but a prominent lady of means went to the city council to spare the building built in 1880's and turned the courtroom into a theater.  Many of the players were semi-professional with commercials shown in Charlotte they were in, but a lot of the were also teachers.  One such man, very popular with his students got the small part of the man delivering room service meal to a couple in Niel Simon's plaza Suite.  It was a simple on and off bit role, but he would wheel a cart of food for the actor's according to the script.  On opening night, the director, our distinguished lady announced a very expensive Persian carpet was donated through the duration of the play by a furniture company in Charlotte.   You can see this one coming a mile away.  

Since I played the bellhop, my part was over in three minutes and all I had to do was sit backstage and help the stage manager and prop lady. Since they had this covered from day one, I was no more than a prop.  We could hear him wheel the cart on stage and then say his line.  He arrives as the couple opening act one are having an argument.  Then to the horror of all the wheels of the cart hit the thick expensive carpet and the cart tipped over sending the dinner all over the carpet.  Stage manager and prop lastly ran in two directions in search of something to clean up the mess.  The actor stood there frozen before saying the most sincere impromptu line ever said on stage, "I am so sorry. Let me get something to clean that!" The lead male in the scene added to the humor of the play by saying, "I guess you can't get decent help even in the Plaza."  The line and audience laughter covered the towel that was tossed to the waiter from offstage by the prop lady.  The director in the back of the auditorium], whispering loudly, "Yes! Yes, get a towel!" Some of my friends in attendance said in a very bewildered way, "funny, I don't remember that happening in the original play."

I worked with the Old Courthouse Theater for another year before enlisting in the United States Air Force in 1979 out of Charlotte.  The carpet disaster became our inside joke and the actor never quite lived it down.  I have a picture somewhere in my memorabilia of me as the bellhop and him as the waiter.  We both look very young and after I left, I never heard from any of them since.  

I do remember my first production with Old Courthouse Tennessee Williams Streetcar Named Desire and the scene where Blanche is trying to describe to Mitch how badly her first marriage ended when she discovered her husband was gay.  She confronted him and he went off to hang himself.  During one of the  performances the stage manager who was a friend of mine casually told me that he had gone to a gay bar the night before and when I asked why he looked at me as if I was stupid and said, “Beacuase I’m gay.  As a matter of fact you and the guy playing Stanley were the only straight people in the cast.”  Your “Ah-Ha” moment always comes when you least expected as I started pointing to some of the cast walking across the stage and he would just nod “yes” with a smile on his face.

At the time I was a fan of musical theater and Chorus Line was the biggest thing in quite a while.  Many of the cast would sing some of the tunes backstage.  It didn’t matter to me what people thought of me, when I was at the theater, I was away from my depressing job of selling term life insurance door to door in Concord. It was the one thing I looked forward to.  

My love of theater would carry me into the military and at my first base we tried to create a group, but it just never got off the ground. I ended up reenlisting and chose to go to a base in Upper Peninsula of Michigan where I saw more snow than I care to remember.  Our group started, but soon after I got orders to Korea.  

On my return from Korea, I came to Beale AFB where there was an established group.  I joined and found I really missed it.  And as soon as I did, I found that every time you venture out onto the stage, the more chances you have for disaster and believe me,  I’ve seen more than my share of disasters and near disasters that feed my actor’s dream all these years later.  You don’t even have to be onstage, plenty of thing can go wrong when you are backstage.

  While doing Ira Levin’s Deathtrap, one of the characters is supposed to light a letter on fire and toss it into the fireplace.  Easy to do, right?  Stayed tuned.

One of the great things about working with theater people is that you are surrounded by creativity you can’t find anywhere else on earth.   This production was one of the Fly By Night productions which was a military repertoire groups I have worked with.  The guy in charge of set design built the fireplace out of styrofoam and painted it to look like a very elegant Victorian fireplace.  From audience’s perspective, this appeared as the Real McCoy, but there was a bucket filled with water inside the fireplace that the audience could not see.  Light the letter and drop the flaming paper into the metal bucket.  Easy, right?  Stand by.  From opening night until the final curtain there was a week, six days separating the performances.  Next Friday, six days after our last performance, we opened for three shows on the weekend.  I was working sound tech backstage and check on the set since this was a tricky murder  mystery.  In getting ready for the sound check, I ran out of time to do a quick check of the set to make sure it was ready.  

As the murder plot unfolds, the lead actor lights the envelope and drops it into the bucket while I ran the thunder soundtrack.  Something wasn’t right.  Something was melting.  Walking over to the fireplace, I saw that all the water had evaporated during the week and the flaming envelope was still flaming and causing such heat that the fireplace was about to melt.  I took my drink and dumped it in the bucket extinguishing the fire.  The damage was minimum and the show went on.  Lesson was learned.

In another production by the same group, I was playing Joe Pendleton in Heaven Can Wait and Joe was a professional boxer who was also a pilot, but when his plane engine failed, an eager angel grabbed him before he crashed only to find out that he would have survived from the head dude.  Now he was in heaven, but he wasn’t supposed to be dead.  Quickly they stick him in a millionaire’s body who is being murdered by his wife.  This was the 1940s, so all plots were supposed to be complicated.  So were the stage directions.  In one scene, I had just knocked out a contender and was in the locker room in my boxing shorts when a young lady came to see me.  I was supposed to be dressed in nice clothes, but when I opened the locker, the prop master had forgotten to put the clothes in the locker.  The scene would be extra funny when the lady showed up while I was in my underwear.  Since the scene was on the right of the stage, no one saw the prop master throw me the clothes which I managed to get on just as the lady entered.  A couple nights later, the locker which was attached to a wheeled cart to get the locker on and off stage easily, but on this night the ties that held the locker on the cart broke and the locker began to fall.  I casually leaned against the locker until someone backstage reached out from behind the curtains and keep the locker steady.  It worked, but panic was first rate.

What about lines?  Well, that can be a problem, because the actor has to remember his or her next line as well as keep in character.  Keeping in character is knowing what the person you are playing would most likely do, say or feel in the scene. This threefold challenge can really cause some problems.  One line, one line in every script I”ve done has presented me with a challenge.  One stinking line and you can see it in my face when I blow it and the line is usually a transition line.  A transition line is a line in the script that signals to the rest of the cast something is going to happen and without the line, it may not happen.  So you can see how critical this line can be. Not only do you have to worry about blowing this line, you also have to worry about your fellow actors and actresses.  

Playing Oscar Madison in Neil Simon’s Odd Couple, one of the male leads, the actor playing Felix Unger found his role challenging and during one performance said a transition line from the third act while we were still in the first act. This is where the classic actor’s nightmare comes from, moments like this when you stand there and you have no idea how to fix this so that the rest of the play will make sense.  Looking into Felix’s face I could see his total panic.  He knew he screwed up the minute the words left his mouth.  Unwilling to let the ship sink, I just laughed and gave one of my “Felix! Felix! Felix!” After which I said the line that was next even though it did not flow with the line he said, but the audience didn’t notice, they were still tickled at the Felix times three. 

Dead air is the actor’s or actress’ worst enemy and it usually means that someone has to call the prompter from the corner of his or her mouth to ask for a line  and the prompter will whisper it so the audience can’t hear, but you know that doesn’t always work.  Still a good prompter has saved many drowning actor or actress. 

Eventually I gave up acting.  It happened when I went to Panama in 1990 and when I returned in 1991, everyone in the company was either getting a divorce or coming out of the closet which at the time with “don’t look, don’t tell,” people declaring themselves gay were not allowed to reenlist.  The divorces were very bitter for some of the company as one of the women declared that she was in love with me.  All because someone had tempted fate and said “Lady MacBeth” backstage during rehearsal.  Now, I ‘m not superstitious, but after that one of the members came after the director with a butcher knife and it was only by luck she was not at home at the time.  After that I decided to leave the group before someone got hurt.  I heard later that after the dust settled and people who came out of the closet were happy living lives as a gay person. I figured all was well.  In December 1992, I decided to be discharged from the military, not because I was gay, but because I wanted to start a new life.

My new life would start in a small community near Guernville, California, near where Jerry Garcia went to high school, so you kind of get an idea of what I was getting myself into, but that’s another story, I ‘m sure I will tell one day.  I have only been on stage two times when I was teaching junior high and was asked to play one of the bit parts in the class play.  It did not reignite my desire to resume my stage career.  It was fun while I was doing it, you know the roar of the grease pain, the smell of the crowd.  But there is that one thing that remains and my wife will ask me what made me scream in my sleep.  I will tell her about the actor’s nightmare, but she just thinks I’m telling a tall tale.

But let me tell you, it’s real.  Yes, it is real. 

I know when I read the prompt that the jitters were supposed to be about something else entirely, but when I thought about the jitters I have encountered, being on and backstage have provided me with moments that made me feel the electricity of sheer panic and fear beyond anything else I have ever done.  When they are about to raise that curtain, you are as alone as you can be, you can smell the fear, it is a real thing.  But you will learn how to use that fear to overcome what you are facing.  If you have ever experienced this, then you know exactly what I am talking about.