"Yeah, you have a really bad poker face at the theatre," he agreed.
We were headed into a night of Halloween shorts put on by a community theatre company in a small beach town that loves Halloween and fall. The local shops all had scarecrows dressed up for a competition, goblins and ghouls and spectres roamed the streets, stores offered free cider, there was music and dancing and pie-tasting and pumpkin-painting and outdoor games and a balladeer singing ghost stories... and there was a night of horror shorts put on by the community theatre.
"Adults only!" the signs around town read. "No children allowed."
"Ooo, you know it's going to be scary when they say adults only," my horror-film-loving husband said enthusiastically, excited for a night of spooks and scares. My own attitude towards horror films can probably best be summarized by the facts that when I watched Puff The Magic Dragon as a little kid I always hid behind the couch whenever the monster came out, I still leave the room every time the T-Rex is about to eat the lawyer in Jurassic Park, and I look up summaries to scary movies before I watch them so I know what's going to happen ahead of time.
But I do love Wait Until Dark and Twilight Zone, and the flyers promised a night of mind-puzzling terror like those... plus I love Halloween and theatre... so that's how we wound up looking for seats not in the front row for the night's production, reminiscing about the last time we sat in the front row at a play and I was doubled over laughing for all the wrong reasons while my husband dug his nails into my leg to try to get me to stop, and then I wound up stage managing a play with one of the actors from that show and wondered the whole run if he recognized me....
Of course there weren't two seats together anywhere but in the front row, so we took the two on the end in the corner, which at least were hidden in darkness.
"It's okay, I'm sure it won't be that bad. And you can keep yourself composed, right?" my husband said.
"Yeah, Uh-huh."
No. Nunh-unh.
I tried. I really did. When the show started and one of the two actors on stage was completely unintelligible, I just leaned forward and tried to adjust to her poor pronunciation and lack of projection. When an FBI agent came out on stage wearing sunglasses as a completely non-humorous costume choice, I just let it fly. When a character said, "first door on the left" to the FBI agent and, due to the set design, the FBI agent promptly took the first door on the right, I cocked my head and turned to look at my husband, but he kept a straight face and didn't acknowledge me, so I tried to settle in. Then, to interrogate a prisoner in the interrogation room, the FBI agent sat down next to the prisoner. Side by side. Facing straight out to the audience.
And that's when the first snicker came out. My husband punched me lightly. I leaned over. "But they're sitting next to each other," I whispered. "In an interrogation. And the prisoner's not handcuffed. And he's touching her." Just then the prisoner, who was also the director (because the director had cast himself in the lead role in every single one of the shorts, a fact that grated on me more and more as the night went on) grabbed the arm of the FBI interrogator as he talked (out to the audience of course rather than looking at her, because obviously if he looked at another actor rather than at the audience, the audience would never hear or see him, right?). A silent giggle escaped my husband. "So they've never seen Law & Order," he whispered back.
I pulled myself together and continued to watch the interrogation scene, wondering if the director had ever watched a play in his life, trying to will him to make eye contact with his scene partner (not that that would be an easy feat since he'd put her in sunglasses for the entire scene). But then as the prisoner talked, we morphed into a flashback of the crime that had landed him in jail in the first place. A crime that involved guns. And gunshots. And therefore sound cues. Sort of.
The two actors with guns (one of whom was the director) aimed them at their victims. Nothing happened. Then the victims dropped as if they'd been shot. I thought it was curious they hadn't made any gun shot sounds, and the director had exhibited very poor judgement in ad-libbing "these things aren't working" after the victims had acted out being shot, but whatever, the victims were shot, moving on... it was in the past....
Or not.
Suddenly, with the scene progressed beyond the shootings, five gunshots rang out.
I clapped my hand to my mouth. My husband started shaking with laughter next to me, neither of us remotely successful at containing it. Then a crew guy slithered out on stage to get something that had accidentally gotten out there, doing the human appearance equivalent of the "slow unwrapping" (you know, when an audience member takes five minutes to very slowly unwrap a hard candy during a play, thinking it's less obtrusive because it's slow but actually calling even more attention to themselves and dragging it out).
When the stage lights suddenly went out during the second short, I had a moment of pity—not so much for the director, who by this point had clearly established himself as stunningly arrogant in casting himself as the lead in everything when he was easily the worst actor on stage and hadn't bothered to put any effort into learning anything about direction, but for everyone else up there who was doing their best.
I've stage managed shows where the lights went out, and unless you have an actual power-out, there are always options if you're prepared and can think calmly. I leaned over to my husband in the darkness as the tech guy scrambled around. "I feel like we should help them."
"He should turn the house lights up," my husband said. "Unless it's a power-out."
"It's not a power-out. You can see lights on in the other room. It's a circuit breaker."
We sat on the edge of our seats, thinking that with all the Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off Broadway shows between us, we could probably help the guy running around trying to get light on these poor actors.
"But wait," I whispered, grabbing my husband's arm, taking a moment to actually take in the show as the actors continued in the darkness. "It's so much better this way.... I mean, it's not worse."
"...You're not wrong," he agreed.
In fact, without the five-people-sitting-in-chairs-in-
But then the tech guy reconfigured the lights and light came up on the director prancing around stage over-acting, failing to make eye contact with anyone, staring at the ground and the walls and anywhere but the other characters (including his "parents," who were probably younger than he was), and I slumped back dejectedly. The definition of bad direction: when you remove it and the play gets better. I think the #1 rule of direction should be "Do no harm."
The third piece didn't have any direction, so I thought it was great. It was just one woman reading a scary story. My husband fell asleep during it, though.
The fourth piece was the best. When the lead woman announced, "I'm calling the police!" and proceeded to pretend to punch in abut 14 numbers on her phone, I laughed (silently) so hard I cried. When she stirred a pot of food she was cooking with the spoon about 2 inches above the pot, I had to bury my face in my husband's shoulder as I shook (not helpful, because he was also shaking with laughter and had tears streaming down his face). When the director randomly decided he was going to be British for this short, I had to stifle a guffaw.
For most of this short, the director was heard but not seen, a spooky, randomly faux-British voice of a spectre that the main characters could see but we could not because he was just off stage—the first directorial choice of the evening I agreed with. I found myself consciously hoping that he would never be seen in this piece, so it was with disappointment that I saw him finally make his appearance... only to once again stand and face straight out towards the audience as he spoke to a character...very slowly....
I tend to speak very quickly, and my husband tends to speak very slowly (at least relative to me). One of the things I sometimes subconsciously do that understandably annoys him is to make a gesture with my hand like "speed up, spit it out” when I feel that he's taking a long time to get to his point. So one of my final big laughs of the night came when I noticed my husband doing that same gesture during the director's final monologue, which was delivered at about half pace. Then what was clearly the last line was delivered and a sound cue moved in... a long, slow sound cue. We were crawling very slowly to the finish line, about 15 minutes after we should have reached it, but it seemed we might never get there. My husband and I both had our hands up poised ready to clap, intermittently making the "hurry up" gesture as the lights did the slowest fade-out in the history of theatre, the actors frozen in place painfully. My husband did one clap. No one joined in. We started silently giggling and then I just dove in clapping as loud as I could, both to bring the thing to an end and to ensure that these brave souls got some hearty applause.
And so that's the story of the funniest play I've ever seen in my life. "You're going to go easy on them in your blog, right?" my husband asked after the cast had bowed and the audience stopped applauding.
Then the director took a second bow, forcing the audience awkwardly to applaud him.
I looked at my husband. "Except on him. I'm not going easy on him."
The morals of this story: If you think you're the best person to play the lead role in a play you're directing, you're probably not; if you think you're the best person to play the lead role in three plays you're directing, you're definitely not; if you think you're so talented you don't need to put any learning or study into a skill before you put it on display, you're wrong; if you think left and right are interchangeable, you're wrong; 911 has three digits; spoons don't work unless they touch what they're stirring; sound cues are frequently better skipped than late; if you never make eye contact, you look creepy; flat lines on stage are bad; it takes a lot of courage to get up on stage in front of an audience, and the people who do that deserve a director worthy of their trust; I have no business ever being in the front row of a play again; and life is more fun when you have someone to laugh with.
