Backstage v/s Life’s Stage

I fell in love with theatre when I was nine years old, acting and singing in my first ever school concert. I was a shy child, a tag-along kid, an outsider even in my birth family, but on stage I was somebody else, and I enjoyed the interaction with the audience. It wasn’t about celebrity, it really was about acting, about playing a role. I was good at that, and I loved doing it.

In High School I played Gilbert & Sullivan: a policeman in The Pirates of Penzance and the Duke of Plaza Toro in The Gondoliers. In the Port Moresby Arts Council I was a pirate in Penzance, the younger Diaforus in the Imaginary Invalid, and a cowboy and a stage door Johnnie in Calamity Jane. Then I joined the Air Force. There is no way you can commit to being available for scheduled theatre performances when you could be sent on trips away at any time, so I was unable to continue in theatre. Because of my work choice, my love of theatre was denied me.

I was no longer able to be involved in theatre, but it has been said that the world is a stage on which we all are actors, and there is some validity in that. On that stage individual actors come and go, but the performance never ends, and in our own lives we are always at centre stage, never backstage.

I had fallen in love with Barbara when I was seventeen; not so much fallen in love as grown in love, so deeply in love that I would have done anything for her. I loved Barbara so much that when she decided she had to move on I did not try to stop her. Instead, I drove her to the interstate railway station and held back the tears until her train had gone. After Barbara left me I met Anne, who also tried to seduce me but also failed, just as Barbara had. I was an honourable young man who treated women with respect and courtesy and consideration, view marriage, not a low-life who just used women. But eventually I understood that women wanted more than I was offering them.

My first lover, Julie, was absolutely wonderful, though I did not realise how wonderful until after I had left her and lost her and had been with some more mediocre lovers, like the stunningly beautiful but log-like Agnes. Not only was Julie an amazing lover, she was the only woman who ever loved me the way I had loved Barbara, enough to let me go when I foolishly decided to leave her because we were making love without being legally married. Or did she simply not care enough for me to ask me not to go?

After I broke off with Julie I had no serious relationship until I met Mary, who gave birth to my child nine months after our last weekend together. By the time I learned about Mary's child I was with Lesley, who I married, but the marriage did not go well. Lesley and I shared a huge driving compulsion to be together, to do what a man and a woman do together, from the very first moment we set eyes on each other, it was lust at first sight, complete and unabridged, raging pheromones, and we remained totally in lust with each other throughout the marriage, but it was never love. Inevitably the marriage degenerated, we hurt each other a lot, and eventually we parted for the last time.

When the marriage ended I was no longer in the Air Force, so I was free to return to my first love, the theatre. I responded to a newspaper advertisment for auditions for The Merry Widow, hoping to be accepted in the chorus and work my way up to solo roles in later productions. At the end of the auditions the director apologised for not offering me the lead role, he was reluctant to do so because I was new to that theatre group and he did not know me, so he offered me a secondary role instead: Bogdanovitch, a sophisticated ladies’ man, one of several hoping for his chance with the wealthy widow. That was not me, but on stage I was never me, I was always the character I was playing, I was using the Stanislavski method before I knew it was a method, it had been my natural way of acting since I first went on stage at nine years old.

If you are a Stanislavski actor, you become the character you are playing, and not only on stage. When you are backstage you are also the character you are playing, and even in your everyday life you are partly that character. For the duration of a production, from first rehearsal to last performance, you become another person, and you have to be aware of that. Especially backstage. On stage you are the person you are supposed to be, no problem there, and in your daily life you can manage your assumed personality, apart from an occasional out-of-character word or action by the person you really are. But backstage you need to maintain your assumed character, ready for your next entrance. And that can have ramifications.

In the chorus of The Merry Widow there was a woman about my age who had never married. She knew I was post-marriage, which made me an eligible male in her eyes. We got on well together, quietly chatting and flirting backstage, but she did not understand that the man she was actually courting was Bogdanovitch, not me, and I was not perceptive enough to stop being Bogdanovitch when engaging with her. I was Bogdanovitch, both on stage and backstage. Whether it was Bogdanovitch or me she was courting may not have been a major issue to a woman in her late twenties who wanted a husband and family and whose biological clock was ticking, the real problem was that it was not me who was flirting with her, it was Bogdanovitch. Bogdanovitch was free to engage with any woman he fancied. I was not. I liked the backstage lady, but I already had a girlfriend, a young woman I had met in my day job not long after my wife and I had separated, and I was not a ladies’ man like Bogdanovitch, I did not want to play around, I wanted a stable, committed relationship, the companionship that had been lacking in my marriage, and I believed I was developing that with my new lover. The lady backstage in The Merry Widow also wanted a stable, committed relationship, it was obvious she was courting me view marriage, but she did not understand that the man she was actually courting was not me, and she did not realise that I already had a lover. Suzie never attended rehearsals with me, and she never came backstage after a performance, so none of the cast had met her, so the lady Bogdanovitch was flirting with backstage had no idea that I was already spoken for despite being only a few months out of a broken marriage.

Some theatre groups celebrate an opening night with a party afterwards. That group had the party after the final performance, to celebrate a succesful season, and I took Suzie with me to the party.

Suzie was tall and elegant, one in a million, a very classy lady. When I walked down the street with her on my arm I loved seeing the question in other men’s eyes, “How did a little weed like him get a gorgeous woman like her?” Just being with Suzie made a man feel like a million dollars. Compared with her, even the leading lady in the cast of The Merry Widow was a Plain Jane. And the young woman who had set her hopes on me backstage was not the leading lady.

I circulated around the party, introducing Suzie to my cast-mates, happy and proud to show her off to them, until Suzie asked me “Why does that woman over there keep looking daggers at me?”

I had no idea why anybody would look daggers at Suzie, least of all any of my fellow thespians, until I realised who the aggrieved woman was. It was the woman Bogdanovitch had been flirting with backstage. I was acutely embarrassed. We were no longer backstage, I was no longer Bogdanovitch, and it was obvious that the woman Bogdanovitch had been flirting with backstage had expected to be with me at the party, not to see me with another woman, let alone one so striking as Suzie. Unlike me, she had not only been playing in The Merry Widow, she had also been playing in the theatre of life.