Old man in a diaper

STIPIMM: “Games Without Frontiers,” by Peter Gabriel

Imagine, if you will, an auditorium packed to the aisles with young adults. They’re all in a festive mood; it’s Saturday night, after all. Many if not most of them are drunk, and still others are high. Lots of laughter, lots of noise, much rejoicing. Then, on the stage, a performance begins. A troupe of actors sets out performing short humorous sketches. The crowd eats it up.

Just then, in the back of the auditorium, there’s a shout. Into the room strolls a man in his 80s, clad only in a loincloth. The crowd silences, but twitters at the sight. The man is angry, he shakes his fists and yells at the crowd to be quiet. After he’s said his peace, he strides back out of the room and the students are left bewildered.

Another dream of mine? Nope, folks. This actually happened.

This weekend, Bridget and I went to a performance at BU of a student improv troupe called Spon-Com. We were there early, so we got to sit in the front row, and soon the place was packed to standing-room only. As I said, most of the people in the room were probably intoxicated in one form or another… of course, Bridget and I being the old-fogey exceptions.

The performance got started shortly after 10 p.m. with another local improv group opening up for the student act. It was just starting to rev up when the aforementioned shout came from the diaper-clad elderly man in the back of the room.

Why was there an old man wearing only a loincloth? An eternal question, indeed. The answer was quite simple. Across the hall from the auditorium where we were, there was another production going on, a professional, high-quality production of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” (that Bridget and I got to see the week before). Last Saturday night was the last performance of this production, and it was to last until 10:30 p.m. You can start to see where this is going.

For those of you who don’t know much about “Lear,” it involves an old king who goes crazy right before your eyes over the course of the play. This role was played by Boston acting legend Alvin Epstein, who, among other notable things, once played the Fool to Orson Welles’ Lear. The man has cred and as Bridget and I saw last week, a hell of an actor. Sometime during the fourth act, Epstein’s Lear is so nuts that he takes to wandering around in his underwear, i.e., just a loincloth. It’s actually a powerful image in the context of the play – this once-great king, withered by time, exposed and virtually naked.

Alvin Epstein berates a member of the improv troupe after cutting his eyes out.

Outside the context of the play, however, it’s not quite as dramatic. Indeed, it’s quite funny. So when King Lear came striding into the auditorium in his skivvies yelling for people to quiet down because it was interfering with their performance, people (including Bridget and I) at first thought it was a brilliant part of the improv event. I mean, could you really plan something better than that? One of the best actors in town comes into this student performance looking ridiculous (and yet dressed in a seminal role) and pretending to throw his weight around?

But after a few moments, it was clear that Epstein wasn’t playing. He really did want everyone to shut the hell up. It remains to be demonstrated to my satisfaction that the noise from the auditorium really was disturbing “Lear” (I could hear the T car come by from where we sat when we saw it). However, even the drunkest among the bunch (all theatre people) were able to grasp the gravity of someone like Epstein coming in to dress them down, so people were suitably cowed.

Problem is, of course, there was an improv performance going on. The actors, at first, were as befuddled as the audience, but they helped enforce the quiet rule (drunk people have to be constantly reminded) and even made light of it, as quietly as possible.

After that first troupe had their set, everyone sat to wait for Lear to finish. When it finally did, a huge whoop and holler spread over the room and the student-led group, Spon-Com took the stage. More on that, and last week’s event at the Improv Asylum, in my next post.