From the Daily Telegraph comes a story of an actor who stabbed himself onstage by accident.. I hope he’s okay. I can easily imagine how it happens: it’s hot, you’re sweaty and focused and maybe very much in the moment as you draw the prop knife across your throat — and you know immediately that something is very, very wrong, and the blood comes out, and the pain, and the world tips 10 degrees to the right…
I’ve never done something like that (all my injuries came in rehearsals), but I was there one time when it happened.
When I was working on my theatre degree, I had the good fortune to learn, work and play with Bret Ancell, who was talented and funny and especially gifted at improvisation and finding the absurdities in small moments.
One year, the theatre department did Romeo and Juliet, directed by Paul Massie, a great teacher and charismatic actor who we were all half in love with because he was that charming. So everyone worked hard for Paul. I wanted to be Juliet, but I didn’t get the part, and so I took the job of assistant stage manager. It was Shakespeare, it was R&J, and I just wanted to be a part of it.
During performances, Suzanne, the stage manager, sat up in the booth and called the show. For the non-theatrical, that means that she was on headset telling everyone when to do what — lighting cues, sound cues, scene changes, etc. There were hundreds of lighting cues alone, all written down in Suzanne’s Big Notebook along with every single piece of blocking, line edit, costume change, etc.
As ASM, I was in charge of backstage. I gave the actors their time warnings, double-checked that all the props were in place, and spent the show on headset in the stage left wing making sure everyone was in place for their entrances, that scenery shifts went smoothly, and ready to prompt if anyone needed it.
We were several shows into the run, and one night little things were going wrong. Not enough to change the show for the audience, but enough for cast and crew to notice and maybe be a little thrown. And Bret was doing a scene with his extremely blunted dagger — seriously, it was so blunt that the end wasn’t a point at all, it was more like… hmm, like the end of an Allen wrench, maybe. Squared off, at least 1/8 – 1/4 inch thick. It was safe.
Well, hah. Bret slipped, or stumbled, or something happened, and he basically fell onto his own dagger so hard that the damn thing punched a nice square hole in his abdomen. About six feet away from where I was sitting on my stool with my headphones.
He went white. His scene partner blinked. And then they went on with the scene, Shakespeare flowing trippingly from their tongues and just the tiniest bit of blood on Bret’s shirt.
There was no way I could get on the headset with everyone listening and tell Suzanne that the lead actor had just put himself in the hospital. So I did What No ASM Must Ever Do. I abandoned my post and scuttled behind the curtains of the aisle up to the lighting booth. Suzanne was calling cues bam bam bam, so fast she couldn’t take here eyes off the notebook to look at me. But she knew I was there, and she was pissed.
Until I said Bret stabbed himself, and then she was just… well, she was amazing. I don’t remember a lot of the details at that point, just that Suzanne was the calm center of what could have been a real shitstorm if anyone had been allowed to freak out.
After some frenzied negotiation, I went back to my post with strict orders from Suzanne to keep myself and everyone else together. I checked on Bret. Someone put a bandage on his tummy. I told everyone in my most stern ASM voice that Suzanne said to stay calm. Then I stood terrified (in a calm way, grin) in the wings with two large young men ready to run out and scoop Bret off the stage if he started talking nonsense or falling down. Bret finished the show, although I’m pretty sure that there were a few moments when he honestly had no idea where he was or what he was doing. There is a reason that we rehearse these things all those weeks, you know? And then we all went to the hospital.
Bret was okay, thank goodness — we all liked him and admired the fact that he went the distance without passing out or wandering off into some other script. And of course it was probably dumb to go on with the show. *Shrugs* That’s what actors do unless we are actually unconscious or bleeding out on stage.
I have a lot of other theatre stories to tell one of these days — how I almost was in R&J after all, the day I did a monologue with a shotgun in a bikers’ bar, the night I was sure someone was coming to kill me up in the lighting loft. Good times.