being an understudy makes me low key wanna die
so we're doing Night of the Living Dead at my high school, which is pretty cool (lot's of crazy effects and stage combat) and I'm the understudy for the lead, Barbra. Again, awesome (i'm a lowerclassman so this is pretty big)
So all of the understudies (there's one for almost every named character) will not only play zombies for shows they aren't playing the people their understudying for in, but will be playing their named character for all Saturday 4 PM shows.
The only problem is not only do we have to memorize a path for the zombie, (which we had exactly one day to memorize, needless to say it hasn't been going well on that front) memorize all of our lines, memorize all the blocking for the characters, AND attempt to be good all at the same time. And that would be fine... If we got any time actually on the stage.
So far we've been rehearsing for about a month and a half, and the understudies have never done more than a scene or two together on the stage. Not to mention that we also need to perfect our own stage combat (which usually involves other people) but we also have to just be more confident with our performance. Hell, the guy playing the lead opposite me still doesn't have all of his lines down, and we open at the end of the month.
It's a lot, but I guess I just wanted to rant to you guys about the lack of understudy time. And that isn't me being whiny and saying 'we never get anything!!1!' I wholeheartedly mean that. There's a sequence at the beginning of the show where two zombies attack my character and her brother, and it involves a lot of stage combat, which we learned yesterday. The guy choreographing the fight said 'okay let's give the understudies a turn' because we're probably going to have to rework some parts because the guy playing Johnny (the brother) and his understudy have a noticable height difference. and the director of the show literally said 'no, we'll do that later.' Which, of course, is translated to 'nope not happening.'
And so today I work up the nerve to ask the two guys playing the zombies in that scene to run it with me ( thank you social anxiet) and the girl I'm understudying for -who really is a swell gal- asks if it's okay if she watches so she can help. And of course I say sure, because we need all the help we can get... until it turns into the non-understudies running it a dozen times while we only ran it once.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that understudying is kinda difficult when you literally get no chance to do anything ever