To help you appreciate the art of Lakeside’s enormously popular Little Theater, I want to share with you exactly what goes on behind the stage walls and into the corridors of the creative action itself, as I first experienced it.
First, unsung vital work is being done like a peopled cardiovascular system behind the scenes. A dozen or more volunteers flow about unseen getting stage settings and changes ready, and assisting the actors with make-up and costume. Talented lighting and sound tech people make the stage wake up for every scene. Wardrobe staff could be creating as many as 140 different costumes (actually happened) for each show. Costume problems persist beyond the premier: they need to be cleaned over the show’s run, because under torrid stage lights and nervous sweat, costumes can actually become microbial ecosystems and begin to decompose mid-performance. After the run, burying some costumes is really the humane thing to do.
All this behind-the-scenes pumping of adrenalin is enough to power an elephant stampede. It is a well-oiled, well-managed collaborative machine.
Also, behind the scenes, some actors are still memorizing lines up to the last minute: For most, me included, memorizing lines means reciting lines over and over and over and over, until everyone who lives with you suddenly starts hinting about taking long tours through Central America.
Now, on stage everything you see is fake: the food, the fireplace fire, etcetera. In my first show, even my hair came courtesy of shoe polish, spit-shined. Furthermore, patient and skillful make-up staff, in order to reduce my age, had to layer make-up on me so thick I looked, from the audience, to be digitally blurred. Caught on the street in such garishness, I might have been left for dead by skinheads.
In addition to memorizing lines, actors have to memorize their “blocking,” the Theater’s term for getting actors around the stage so they aren’t bumping into one another or the furniture while they speak their lines. For example, the line “Welcome, darling! Delighted to see you!” naturally has to be said at a place where the speaker can see his or her lover. If an actor is standing behind a potted nasturtium when he says this, the audience may think the actor has a freaky nasturtium fetish.
If that isn’t enough, everything actors say on stage often has to be shouted until they’re hoarse. Even a dying man’s whispered sentiment, such as “I feel at peace now, my child,” needs to be screamed into another actor’s face, so that the guy who’s sleeping in the back of the theater not only hears you, but wakes with a start.
At the same time, while the play unfolds onstage, backstage everyone is sitting nervously hush-hush waiting for their next entrance. No one can speak, get in anyone’s way, do anything that might break another actor’s concentration. You go through a period vaguely similar to high school detention, but without the excitement. Then, suddenly, out of this zombie state, a waiting actor has to bound out from the wings, without prepping, to belt out, “There’s No Business Like Show Business! Like no business I know!” The audience has no clue the actor was face-slapped to full alert and shoved on stage by an ever-vigilant stage manager.
Not surprisingly, there can also be the opposite of waiting around. These are the quick changes. Sometimes, a whole stage day will go by with a curtain closing and opening in 75 seconds of real time, and you will have to change from last evening’s tuxedo into your early morning tennis outfit within 60 seconds. This usually requires help from ever-ready backstage assistants. The challenge in such a rush is making sure the change is complete, so that you aren’t skipping out on stage “next morning” in whites and a tennis racket and still in your black socks and Italian loafers.
Most of you know that theater people are notoriously superstitious. The one supersti tion familiar to most is that no actor must ever hail another actor with the expression, “Good luck,” however innocently the words may be uttered. Such a miscue, it is believed, will jinx the entire show. “Break a leg” is the proper expression.
I made the dumb mistake of blurting out “Good luck” just before a show. Everyone within hearing range flew into a panic. You’d think I’d said, “I may have an airborne infectious disease that consumes flesh.” People, normally thoughtful and stable, were whirling around in a frenzy, spinning three times and throwing salt over their shoulders, much of which landed in the eyes of other actors doing the same thing. Others were cowering in the corners of the green room squeezing their temples between their palms and sobbing. Still others rushed out for a cigarette and a chance to caress their Hamsa amulet. I was apologizing up and down for the mishap, but remained unheard and unforgiven for the remainder of the evening.
Finally, community theater reviews tend to be friendly and favorable, and generally, deservedly so. But sometimes a real review would be more genuine proclaiming: “Absolute load of drivel. Lead actor, a man with the charisma of a condo-board president, made even the old Bauhaus sofa memorable.” And so on. But this would never happen in a community theater production. Because all hell would break loose.
But the question that kept popping into my mind all the while was, “Is this really how Shakespeare started?”