A Theatre Tale
I was once in this strange production of Playboy of the Western World that the director/producer/lead actress put up for an interminable number of Sunday night performances at a NYC comedy club. The show basically was playing for several months, Sundays only. Midway through the run, one of our cast members was scheduled to be in a wedding out of town, so we were promised that there would be an understudy actor for that particular performance.
We started the run, and no word of this understudy, weeks went by, and no understudy. Finally, two weeks before the actor’s wedding obligation, we were called to a special rehearsal to meet our new actor. We were greeted by a very nice man with a thick Ecuadorian accent. To play the Irish father of the main character. We went through the rehearsal, and he read the script with a skill level which could best be described as “phonetically.” Our director assured us that he would be fine, and off book by the performance in two weeks.
To paraphrase Mike Birbiglia: “I know, I’m in the future too.”
Two weeks later we all get calls from the director. Our replacement actor was not off book. Because of that, we were to treat the performance as a staged reading, and we would all have scripts in hand. No word how to deal with stage business, fight scenes, etc. Night of, the rest of the actors decided that we were not going to go out there with scripts in our hands, and he would be just fine going out with a script.
So, the play went on pretty much as usual until his first scene, about midway through the play. He came on stage, saw that no one else had a script, and decided that he needed to toss his too. However, he seemed to remember only one or two actual lines, and tried desperately to exit the stage, prevented by the rest of us. We basically improvised around him for a bit of the scene, until other actors made their entrances, and we went on. Someone persuaded him to keep on script for the next and final scene of his, so it went more smoothly, but his accent and J.M. Synge’s rendering of Irish dialect still pretty much made everything unintelligible.
The next week, our regular actor was back, and we had a smooth show. The week after that, our director/producer/lead actress called us up to tell us that the Comedy Club had reneged on their end of the contract and cancelled our show (there were several more weeks to go). She said she was looking at it with her lawyers and would get us up and running. We never did, and you know, I really didn’t mind.
