Since I wrote yesterday about Bret stabbing himself, I’ve had a whole surge of college / theatre department / acting memories. So here’s another story.
From the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary:
trouper noun
1 a successful entertainer who has had a lot of experience
2 APPROVING anyone with a lot of experience who can be depended on and does not complain: Good old Edna – she’s a real trouper to do the washing-up without even being asked.; He took his disappointment like a trouper.
I really did want to be Juliet. Sigh. But it was not to be — a) there were better actors than I to fill the role (digression here: people in Hollywood talk all the time about “actresses” and I try to behave in their company, I really do, because it’s polite to speak the native language if one can. But we’re all actors, people! Yeesh.) and b) I was taller than Romeo, and gods know in the 80’s we just couldn’t have that kind of thing on stage.
Our Juliet was a student in her late 20’s who was small and fresh-faced and could still play a teenager. Our Lady Capulet (Juliet’s mum) was a student in her late 20’s/early 30’s who looked, as we liked to say in the South, like she’d been drug down a mile of hard road. She was, I now understand, deeply depressed and doing her best to just hang on. At the time, because I was young and stupid, I just thought she was gloomy and grumpy and a little weird.
One afternoon during the run of the show, my stage manager Suzanne came and pulled me out of class and took me for a little walk. She put an arm around me. “Kelley,” she said, “you know the tradition that if something happens to an actor, the ASM steps into the role?”
“Um, no,” I said, “I don’t know that one.”
She said, “Well, I need you to be a trouper. Because we may need you to be Lady Capulet tonight.” Then she smiled and squeezed my shoulder, and before I knew it I was in the costume shop being fitted, and then in an empty room with the choreographer learning the dances. Yep, dances. I pretty much knew all the lines, I’d been prompting for six weeks, but the dances… And I knew enough to be terrified: knowing lines from the third row every rehearsal is a hell of a lot different than knowing them in the moment, under the lights and the hot heavy gaze of the audience, especially when one is trying to sort out her left foot from her right.
6:30 pm. Actors’ call. No Lady Cap. Suzanne smiles reassuringly.
7:00 pm. Cast warm-ups. I take my place and start stretching and la-la-la-ing. Suzanne is practically incandescent with calm. The director gives me an enormous hug, looking exactly like Peter O’Toole in The Stuntman, that particular combination of what a cock-up and isn’t it all exciting? The actors look at me with varying blends of sympathy, concern and well, that’s you fucked. And I trouped. I trouped until 7:25 pm when Lady Capulet came into the room.
Everyone looked at her. Everyone looked at me. The director said, “Thank you, Kelley.” And I nodded and left the room before I gave in to my impulse to smack Lady Cap into next week and thereby ensure that I would have to play the role after all.
I still don’t know what happened. But whatever it was, I understand now how brave she must have been to have come back when she did. I imagine at that point it would have been far easier to just bail. I think she was much more a trouper than I.
First let me say that I believe self-deprecating humor to be the best and most charming kind. Your story made my day. And because your experience went toward making you kind in the long run, I hope everbody grows up to be you.
That’s really sweet, thank you, but there are parts of me that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, honestly. I’m still entirely capable of being so self-absorbed that I can miss the fact that someone is being weird because they’re in pain.
But I do have more of a clue than I used to, at least (grin).
Ah, the acting world. The girl who snatched a copy of your DS on my blog because she said she was so sad she needed it more than anyone, told me a similar tale over Facebook not long ago. She was called to replace the actor (?) (I still want to write actress) who played Ophelia, because the original had some horrible disease. When the sick woman showed up, skin stuck to her bones and her eyes yellow, my new FB friend wanted to choke her. She did concede that having the original Ophelia, no matter how sick, was better than throwing herself unprepared over the cold stage. She said she ended up laughing at how badly she wanted to play the part, even if the rushed rehearsal had been one of the most stressful experiences.
It’s hard to be sympathetic with the pain of others when you’re being placed under so much stress, trying not to let people down. But then, I may just be saying this because I’m terribly self-absorbed and a drama queen.