A Life in the Theater, Part the Fourth

                 My first professional show!  Also the first time I got paid to act!  Also, one of the more bizarro life experiences ever.

                The play, Marat/Sade, is a wonderful quasi-musical that plays out some of the highlights of the French Revolution as performed by the inmates of a lunatic asylum.

                I got a call one day from a man with a very thick Eastern-European accent who wondered if I would be interested in a role in his production.  He said he had seen my work before and liked it (!?).  It was a non-speaking role as one of the brutish asylum guards (apparently he liked my “brutish” qualities).  I would be on stage the entire time and would get to do various and sundry stuff, like restrain and beat the inmates when they got out of line and look menacing.  I said, sir, sign me up.

                The cast was a mix of Equity, non-equity actors and two musicians (a violinist and a trombone player).   The cast and backstage personnel were also a rather bizarre assortment of humans.  The young woman who played Charlotte Corday, with two weeks to go before the premiere, decided a theater showcase in New York, was much better suited for her career, so she promptly quit the show.  Her replacement was awful.  The actor portraying Marat quit in the middle of the run.  They had to get some poor guy who had done the show in college, who barely remembered the lines and often extrapolated them nonsensically in performance much to the cast’s delight.  The actor who played DeSade was certifiable.  He had a reputation as being incredibly difficult and would often perform stoned.  Some of his monologues were cut for brevity; however, I once remarked that I missed a certain monologue so that night he put it back in.  Thanks, guy.

                The stage manager would barely communicate with those of us who either had no lines or he didn’t like (I fit into both categories) and would repeatedly kiss the asses of the stars and the actors (esp. female) that he did.  This was one of the first plays where the makeup I had to put on was somewhat complex and I had to ask the stressed out makeup person for help every night.  I tried to do it myself and every night she would have to touch it up or redo it (any career as a clown was out of the question).  I think I got it right once.  On a side note, I ran into her in New York and she was completely different, transformed.  We became friends.

                It was also the first cast that I would hang out with (at the corner bar) after the show.  A semi-regular occurance.  Actors sometimes make the best/worst drinking partners. I fell head over heels in love with one of the women playing one of the nuns (they’re something weirdly Freudian there), alas, that never went anywhere.  We were good friends, but she was more interested in the creepy stage manager.  

I had a few more shows to go before I moved to New York.

Hi Diddly Dee, it's the actor's life for me!