Why do we do it to ourselves? What kind of people are we, those who expose everything they have to the public night after night? We set ourselves up for defeat, for ultimate embarrassment. Who are we?
Last nights performance was, as Sherrie Dee so succinctly put it this afternoon, "a night of dropsies." Everything fell: teacups fell off of tables, guns fell (bounced rather) off of beds, and apparently people were falling left and right, though I noticed none of that from my station in the back of the house.
It was not until I came back stage for the first intermission and saw one of our singers laughing hysterically as Tim Kuhn tries to fitfully tell me a story of miscalculated footing that I realized anything had happened. Apparently,one of our named miners took a step backwards during one of the fights and realized after he'd stepped that there was no ground behind him. He fell right off the platform and ended up spread-eagled between the top platform and the deck while still trying to sing and pay attention to the action. He was bright red and trying to breathe through his laughter. The rest of us, at first, were worried that he had injured himself, and later joined in the laughter with him as the moment rang familiar for any of us who had spent time on stage.
We all have these stories. It keeps theater life interesting and gives us tales to regale as we enter new theaters, make new connections.
The first picture is me, Philip Leete and Michael Mizerany in crazy masks that created many amusing tales for us as we traveled with Andrew Sinclair's production of "The Pearl Fishers" over the last two years. This shot was for the Michigan Opera Theater production, and that's William Burden taunting us at the moment. In San Diego, I carried that mask around in my car for two weeks while we were rehearsing in different studios, which always illicited comment. I've run into walls wearing that cumbersome thing, mixed up downstage and upstage while dancing with the black veil over my face, and, in my most embarrassing moment (caught on tape, no less), I bucked forward in my somewhat blind state on stage, only to goose our San Diego tenor with one of my mirror-covered antlers. He was none-too-happy and I was embarrassed beyond belief. (feeling a bit triumphant about the happening as well if I remember right, but that's another story).
My most laughter-filled theater mishap, however, occurred in the first opera I was ever involved. When I did Akhnaten at Chicago Opera Theater, I was the dance captain for a group of dancers who played both servants and members of the huge funeral party at the very beginning of the opera. I carried the pharoah's heart that was to be measured against a feather on the scales, that were personified by my friend Julianne. She wore a blindfold (fake - she could see through it) and carried plates on chains in each hand that she would hold out to the side to "measure" the weight of the feather against the heart. After the measuring ceremony, Julianne would always fold the plates into her chest and walk ceremoniously off stage left while I closed the box that had once contained the heart and walked off stage right. On the night in question, however, Julianne tripped a bit as she closed in her arms and the heart flew off of its plate. I saw it as I began my trek off stage and turned to catch it and put it back in its box (not the original staging, but better than letting it fall and roll into the pit). I was too slow. The heart hit the stage. Instead of slamming into the floor and rolling downstage, however, it bounced back up into the air (being made of rubber . . .). Julianne, in her utter embarrassment and with quick reflexes, reached her hand out and caught the heart in mid bounce. Note that she is supposed to be blindfolded. As soon as the heart was safe, we both went in our respective directions as quickly as humanly possible and broke into fits of uncontrollable laughter just outside of the sight lines in the wings. The horror of that moment (and the hilarity) lay in the fact that the incident happened center stage while everyone else is stock still. There is no way possible that the audience didn't notice. These are the stories we recount for years after the fact.
Not that these incidents are all fun and games at the time. Injuries do happen. The theater is a dangerous place, and we can joke about goosing the tenor and dropping rubber hearts, but sometimes it goes farther. My immediate reaction to falls and flying props is a pang of fear that something has gone injuriously wrong. Those same masks that caused constant laughter through our run of "Pearl Fishers" also caused our first "horse" to slice his hands open when two of the mirror pieces were not properly sealed along the edges. The ground cloth for that production still bears blood stains from that fateful evening. Bless Kevin Herman, the victim, who still showed up at the cast party later that night with his face covered in smudged orange makeup and his hands bandaged so that he could barely hold a drink (he, who probably needed one far more than any of us).
The same fall that our miner had the other night happened to one of my dancing girls during a dress rehearsal of the "Bartered Bride" I choreographed at DePaul University several years ago. While the other night resulted in hysterical laughter, Katie was not so lucky. She fell off the back of a bench, caught herself in some scenery, and the next thing I saw from the audience was her hoop skirt fly over her head as she cried out bloody murder. I don't even remember how I got up on that stage. I also don't remember if she had a fracture or a bad sprain, but she went to the emergency room and many of us followed suit soon after. I still can't laugh about an incident like that. All I remember is sitting next to her as she lay whimpering on the stage, watching her leg twitch uncontrollably in pain while she apologized for ruining the show. My heart was in my throat but I understood . . . I also blame myself when senseless accidents happen.
This graphic picture shows the worst injury I ever sustained while performing (thus far). It happened during a rehearsal while we were shooting my first dance film, "The Soul of Saturday Night." One of our shoots was at a bar, the Aero Club, in San Diego. I was supposed to sit on a bar stool, catch Michael Mizerany as he leapt in my lap, then rotate on the stool as he arched backwards. When we got to the bar, the stools were not as steady as we hoped. I expressed my discomfort with the action but tried it anyway. As we began the rotation and Michael arched backwards, the whole stool tipped. In an effort to save Michael's neck from hitting the brass rail, I arched to one side, got my legs entangled in the stool and "went down with the ship." My thigh slammed into the stool leg and was bruised beyond belief.
I still don't laugh about that now. I have plenty of other incidents to laugh about. This one, I remember with a bit of frustration and hindsight. Why do we do things we know aren't going to work? Because, like the fact that we get up endlessly and risk embarrassing ourselves, we risk injuring ourselves as well. We want the work to be good. We want it look the best it can look, to show off our skills, to impress, to make people stand up and take notice. We risk our ego, our selves, to create something risky, beautiful, powerful enough to be proud of.
I got up and shot the rest of that film that night without another word. The bruise was added to a list of stories that would later be laughed and gasped at by many backstage audiences. Theater people, like everyone else, are comforted by the pain and embarrassment of others. Perhaps more so, lest we would be unable to deal with our own.
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