Tales From The Theater: WWPBD

My weekend was eaten up by a foul beast called Tech. It is also referred to in some circles as hell week. Whatever, it's actory nonsense and I can't imagine it being terribly interesting to anyone (even other actors). But as it's all I did this weekend, and what I will be spending my non work time on this week I feel pressed to write about it. Read on at your peril!

A glossary of terms:
10 of 12's - The theater is booked for twelve hours (10am to 10pm) and actors are expected to be there 10 of those 12 hours.
Cue to cue - A start and stop run through the show, stopping and starting at each sound cue. Same to be done again for each lighting cue.

Honestly I could complain about having to go through our 10 of 12's, it's tedious and frustrating and tiring, but when it comes down to it, it's acting. I spent close to 20 hours this weekend doing something that I love, something that I'm constantly surprised people let me do. But because there is a lot of idle waiting around, people are bound to get on other people's nerves. And better yet, people are bound to get effing delirious.

It started unraveling with talk of the abandoned baby polar bear that some animal rights activists argue should not be allowed to live.

Actors began to throw out random polar bear facts: Polar bears hunt men (as do koala bears I pointed out to no one's belief, they just don't do it that well), polar bears cover their noses with their paws when their hunting, polar bears and penguins do not co-exist. It was when I volunteered the information that it was in fact a polar bear that went back in time and killed JFK, well the train derailed.

We talked about great actors who had done amazing portrayals of polar bears in their careers: Kevin Bacon, Lee Marvin and Morgan Freeman to name a few. I mentioned Steven Spielberg's ill advised attempt to make a film about a robot polar bear who goes on a search for his mother. Matt nodded in affirmation, "Yeah I saw that one. It was called P.B."

Gone. I wish I could give you more details on the day, but everything took on that haze of 3 day drug binge; a little headachey and a little surreal. For some reason a bunch of us started doing bad Irish accents which led to Matt singing Captain Quint's "Farewell and ado to you fair Spanish ladies" song from Jaws in said bad Irish accent. In a move that endeared him to me forever, Matt then began Captain Quint's U.S.S. Indianapolis speech, but replacing sharks with polar bears. I finished up with, "300 men went into the water, 15 1/2 came out, polar bears took the rest..."

It was good, we were laughing hard at this point. But when we began pointing out our polar bear attack scars to each other, and I (ala Richard Dreyfuss) pointed to my chest and said, "Mary Ellen Moffet", it was off the charts. We were so delirious that we had to run away from each other and try to cover up our screaming laughter. This was seconds before being called onto stage.

Instead of the normal cue to cue, we were actually going through the entire scene and both of us had eyes bulging from trying not to laugh, both let out snorts of vicious laughter trying way too hard to escape. The director, brave lass that she is, tried to give us notes and I had to let her know that although I had just done it a minute and a half ago, I had no memory whatsoever of the scene she was talking about.

So, lock a group of attention whores with a modicum of improv training into a dark basement for 10 hours and you take your chances. I'm worn out, as I'm sure is the rest of the cast, and while I'm sort of leery of going back in for more tonight after work, I'm also kinda looking forward to it.

I've a got a full week of tech and dress rehearsals. We open Friday, presure's on...