"I have nothing to offer anyone except my own confusion..."

STIPIMM: “Stuck In a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” by U2

My nerves were relatively smooth throughout the day Monday. I had an occasional moment of stomach-tightening, but for some reason, I was able to compartmentalize the performance and not think about it much while I was at work.

This changed once I got home to get ready and pick up Bridget to go to the show. The jitters were definitely there, but they were still very manageable. Performance anxiety has never been debilitating for me, but it has certainly tapered off in recent years. A large part of that is certainly my experience in teaching, which is essentially a performance of another kind in front of an easily bored audience. Nonetheless, the nerves started to mount, so much so that I forgot my headshot, which I had spent an inordinate amount of time procuring (since I didn't really have one before).

We zipped in Phoebe to the theatre and got there with plenty of time to spare. The theatre itself was ImprovBoston, a tiny little black box space that, surprise, primarily housed improvisational comedy groups. At its maximum, it could hold about 100 people. When we got inside, Courtney, who was both producer and actress in the show, was running herself ragged trying to get last-minute things in order. She had warned us that she was a terror before a show, so Liz and I both respectably kept our distances and let her do her thing. Bridget often says she's a pain to be around before a show, but Bridget never threatened to sue a tattoo parlor before a show of hers premiered.*

The three of us actor-types settled down in the green room, which was essentially the low-ceilinged basement below the theatre. The gals did their makeup while I lounged about on the couches. It was at that time that I got the only decent photo I was able to get that evening. I had brought my camera in the hope that there would be time before or after the show to get some pics of the play, but alas, the green-room shot was all I really got.

The actresses prepare (Liz on the left,
Courtney on the right).
Anyway, at 15 'til 8, the fact that we were about to go on stage really sunk in and we started our own little nervous preparation idiosyncrasies. Liz and I wandered around the basement; I managed to find a door that led outside (separate from the one that led to the stage), which made me chain-smoking Courtney's best friend for a while. Courtney alternately smoked and went up to check on the audience. The sales had gone pretty well, and I suppose the audience was half-full (strangely enough, despite being in the room for an hour and a half, I never once took full stock of how many people were there -- I was acting, dammit… if you want details, ask Bridget).

Finally, it was time to get up to the stage and ready to go. Courtney gave us a last thanks and an order to "have fun." Liz did some goofy-cool superstition thing in which she touched all our noses with her thumb (you had to be there to understand). And up we went, down went the lights, and out we scurried to perform.

The play opens with Jonas (me!) and Nona (Liz) sitting in a row of five chairs in the middle of the stage. Nona's in the middle reading** a National Geographic Magazine, and I'm on the far right (looking from the audience), doodling on my arm with a pen. This last detail in the script had been causing me some trouble, because Jonas is supposed to have been apparently doodling on his arm "for some time," which meant there had to be a lot of stuff already on his arm when the lights went up. So, I spent much of my day at work on Monday doodling on my arm, trying various sorts of pens (FYI, Bic ball-points are horrible for writing on your skin!) and all sorts of images. By the evening, I had everything from a sketch of a girl in a bikini to a guy hanging himself in a tree. Bridget also wrote her Kiowa name (Thol-ma) on my arm along with our wedding date.

But I digress. So the two of us are sitting there and out comes Abby (Courtney), fresh out of the snow and looking for a place to sit. She sits on the other end of the chairs (far left) and proceeds to try to strike up a conversation with the rather asocial Nona. I sit listening for six pages (approximately six minutes) continuing my doodling.

And finally, it's my time to speak. According to Bridget, it was clear that I was nervous in the first minute of my dialogue (which basically means that I stumbled over my lines a little bit at first, which I do remember doing), but once it got going, I was fine. And like I said last time, I pretty much don't shut up the entire time. In the first act, I regale the two girls with lots of tall tales about my cross-country adventures, confront Nona about the cold feet she has over her pending nuptials, get the naïve Abby drunk, and after she passes out, I make a concerted pass at Nona, which I abandon just as it's about it bear fruit, earning me a slap in the face at the end of the act.

The first act went very smoothly, if I remember correctly. There was only two areas of dialogue that we missed -- unfortunately one of them was one of my favorite parts of the play, in which drunk Abby gives Jonas a lap dance ("Abby, Jonas wants you to stop." "No, actually, it's okay. She's making a point; let's see where she's going with this. She wants people to know she's not boring."). But missing that part didn't trip us up any.

The other part we missed did trip us up, but according to Bridget and others, it wasn't noticeable from the audience. It happened just as Abby passes out from her drunkenness and Nona and Jonas have to carry her over to sleep it off on the chairs. The carrying is what threw us off -- it's a complicated little procedure in the first place, but it got a little bit more complicated by pure chance: we put her body down on the chairs just such that her head fell between two chairs. And so, we spent an extra few silent seconds (which seemed like an eternity to Liz and me) repositioning a chair so her passed-out head would have some place to fall. Sounds silly, but it did throw us off a bit. I said my line a little bit differently than I had before, and as a result, Liz omitted a key part of her next line, a part that was necessary for my next line to make any sense at all. So… we looked at each other, sticking to the flabbergastedness our characters were feeling, and tried to figure out what to say next. I finally found it, but it ended up omitting a page of dialogue. Not crucial, but still. And that was the only moment in the entire performance where I felt any panic, but I think we both handled it just fine. And most importantly, the audience (or so says Bridget) didn't notice.

During intermission, we were relieved we got through the bulk of the play in one piece (2/3 of the play is in act one), but we went over the first part of the dialogue of the second act. In rehearsals, act two had been our Achilles' heel -- one or more of us (and all three of us were guilty) would forget our lines or lose our place. It's easy to understand why -- there's a lot more going on in terms of action and interplay in the second act, and a lot more to keep track of.

We did it as well as we ever had, though. The first part of the act revolves around Nona's and Jonas' revelations to the others about their feelings about their lives (Nona doesn't really want to get married, but is afraid not to; Jonas doesn't know what the hell to do with his life, so tries out different identities to find one he likes). After Abby staggers off to "throw up everything I've eaten since I was twelve," Nona and a reluctant Jonas go through Abby's luggage to see if there are any clues as to why she's so weird. They find five Ziplock bags full of some mysterious gray powder that Nona quickly determines to be drugs. She convinces Jonas to try some, going so far as to shove a handful of the stuff in his mouth (thus creating a very humorous mess on my face and shirt). When Abby returns and catches Nona and Jonas red- (or gray-) handed, we find out that they weren't drugs at all, but the ashes of her dead boyfriend which she wanted to spread out in every state in the country (she had five states to go). Nona pretty much knew that they were cremains, but had decided to feed them to Jonas anyway to get back at him for his act-one manipulations. Abby screams at Jonas, Jonas faces the realities of barbecue cannibalism, and Nona sits back and gloats. However, with all that's going on, Abby (of all people) has finally put the pieces together: why Jonas and Nona have been stuck at the bus station for weeks; why none of them can really remember how they got there; and why they all seem to be in the same "going-nowhere" situation in their lives. They're dead, and they're stuck together in what they can only guess is a purgatory or limbo. However, just as they all make this realization and start to come to terms with it, their reality shifts, and they return to their positions at the start of the play: Jonas doodling on his arm, Nona pretending to read, and Abby trying to start up conversation. The dialogue is the same as the beginning of the play, and indeed, we are led to understand that the trio are in a perpetual loop of re-examining their lives, realizing their hopeless fates, and then starting it all over again. And they lived happily ever after.

And like I said, we did act two very well. There was only one hiccup, and it was easily pushed through, just as the first hiccup in act one. I had the last line of the play (at least the last line before the cycle began again), and it's a quote of Jack Kerouac's. The line is in answer to Nona's imploring questions about what the heck they're supposed to do now that they realize that they're stuck in this purgatory. Jonas says, "I don't know. I have nothing to offer anyone except my own confusion."*** I spent a while during rehearsal trying to figure out how to say this damn line, and I never quite figured it out. Well, it showed. I didn't nail the line, like I had been hoping to do. As Bridget put it, "You were trying too hard," and she was quite right. Instead of just saying it, I tried to say it. Lesson learned.

But despite a problematic last line, the production overall was a success. After Abby says the real last line of the play ("Abigail Marie Fenton. What's yours?"), the lights went down, we got up, and the lights went back up for us to take our quick group bow. We hurried off stage and down to the green room where we cheered and celebrated. Courtney pulled out a bottle of champagne for a tradition that her theatre company has of having a champagne toast at the end of the final performance of a show (and since this was a one-night-only gig…). After some hugs and some post-show milling about, Bridget and I went out for dinner with Liz and her boyfriend, Mike. After that, we went home, and I slept something fierce.

It was an exhausting experience (though not nearly as exhausting as it was for poor Courtney), but I enjoyed every minute of it. Like I said in my last post -- it was a fulfillment of something I wanted to do for years. Ever since I was in a tiny little role in "Oklahoma!" at Rice, I felt that I had the drive and ability to hold my own starring in a theatrical show, and now I know it for a fact. I hope I get to do it again sometime soon…

* Courtney said that she suspected that this tattoo parlor, one of the places that was selling tickets to the show, had been selling photocopies of tickets and pocketing the money. Not sure if it turned out to be true…
** Actually, she's holding it, but not reading it. Jonas had been staring over her shoulder for a half-hour and she's been on the same page the whole time. So he's thinking to himself, 1) this chick's really into Bengal Tigers and wants to get the full effect of the article; 2) she's completely illiterate and it takes her forever to read; or 3) the most likely option, she's not reading it at all, she's just staring at it and thinking about something else. Or 4) her parents didn't give her enough affection as a child.
*** "I had nothing to offer anyone except my own confusion." is from "On the Road," part two, chapter four.