So these posts are specifically a way to break up the seriousness of my other posts, which will get pretty serious at points as well as an excuse to share some of my nuttier experiences. So I’ll start us all off easy with 2007’s The Scarlet Letter. Or was it Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter?
This was the year of my high school graduation so it would ultimately be my last teen conservatory production at the theater I used to do shows at. The adaptation was a combination of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as well as three of his other short stories. Our director/adapter was going for a theme, namely that Hawthorne wrote about Puritans a lot. Like a lot a lot.
The way the play was broken up was that you saw our little company act out the three short stories (the names of which escape me even though they’re but a Google search away) and then Act One ended with the opening of The Scarlet Letter. You can probably guess what Act Two was. The dialogue was lifted word for word from the original texts which means we had a bit of a challenge ahead of us making it all sound natural. And speaking selfishly, this was a memorable experience for me because it was actually my first big dramatic role (technically it was my first two dramatic roles because I had a big part in one of the short story bits). Up until that point, I’d mostly done comedic roles. But my main part in The Scarlet Letter was Roger Chillingworth, the jilted husband of Hester Prynne, a physician and an all-around nasty sonovabitch. So naturally I loved playing him.
Now here’s where the story gets weird….I actually joined the cast after the first round of auditions. I initially wasn’t going to do the play but I decided to check if they had finished casting. Worst they could say was no, right? Turns out they were actually planning to ask me to come in because they were short on guys (or at least that’s how I remember it) so I said yes and came in the next day. What I also noticed was this one woman who came in with her two daughters and went right up to the director and asked if they could be in the show. Seemed a little forward to me but the director surprisingly said yes. And….how can I be diplomatic about this….you could tell they were new to doing live theater.
But that’s not where things got crazy. The crazy part happened the day of our very last dress rehearsal right before we opened. I had heard a rumor prior to this day that the older sister was planning to leave rehearsal early that day because she had some kind of sportsball game. At the time I thought, “Well, that’ll never happen! It’s the last dress rehearsal for goodness’ sake.”
We had come to the first of the “short story” segments in Act 1, the one wherein I had a large part (phrasing). My blocking was that I say goodbye to the actress playing my wife (I somehow had three failed marriages in this show, can you believe it?) and then turn around to see the older sister and this other girl walking towards me. We have a few lines of dialogue together ( she actually had the first line) and then they leave. Well that night, as we get to that point in the show, it’s been a pretty chill run through so far even though we’re still only a few minutes in. And as far as I remember, the older sister was still in the building when we started. So I turn around to do my bit with the girls…and there is a blank space where the older sister should be. She did it…she actually did it. This chick ditched our last dress rehearsal to go play sportsball!
I don’t know who stood in for her or read her lines for the rest of the night but in that moment, all we could do was keep going. We soldiered through with the rest of the runthrough and all we could talk about backstage between scenes was that we were down an actor. Thankfully she showed up for the performances and the rest of the run went smoothly. And to date, I haven’t had any experiences as drastic as that (ok, there was that one guy who got food poisoning but that’s another story).
That’s live theater, I guess. Sometimes curve balls will be thrown at you when you least expect it. But as you’ll find if you choose to continue reading, sometimes it makes for a damn good story.
So lesson of the story, kids, don’t ditch the last dress rehearsal because sportsball. Get it? Got it? Good.
Till next time.
The Aspie Actor 