I’m beginning to feel left out. Everyone’s typing and talking and singing and shouting about war, and here I am, devoting the lion’s share of my energies to what must, at the very least, be called frivolous theatre. I know I should probably do more discussing and protesting and petitioning and letter writing, but to be honest, I’m a little overwhelmed. I mean, how did it come to this? How did we go from September the 11th to war with Iraq? Even the terminology–at least the stuff being handed down from the military–confuses me. Iraqi Freedom? If we’re going to start freeing the world’s disenfranchised (which sounds a little like commie-pinko rhetoric, if you ask me), why not start with Sudan or Myanmar? And what the hell’s “Shock and Awe”? I thought they were saying “Shokinaw,” which, I assumed, was a town in Michigan….
But back to the stuff that really matters: our show. Last night, opening night, the energy was spectacular. We had a full house of boozy spectators, ready to whoop it up like an audience of shills. I couldn’t have asked for more auspicious circumstances–especially since two of the city’s big critics were there. So you can imagine my chagrin when a man in the audience chose to have a heart attack two-thirds of the way through the first act.
At first, I didn’t know what was going on. I just heard a lot of people getting up, moving their chairs. I thought someone might have seen a mouse or a palmetto bug or something–not uncommon, in the Quarter. But the noise grew louder and became more frenzied, so I stepped out of the tech booth and looked down, and there was a man, sprawled out on the floor, surrounded by a couple of people who were, as the saying goes, doctors in the house. Moments later, someone called for the house lights, and the show came to a big fat screeching halt. We waited ten minutes for the ambulance to arrive, for the stretcher to be wheeled up and down the theater stairs, and for everyone to take their seats after the man was dragged out. And then we tried to pick up where we’d been interrupted.
By and large, the rest of the play went fine. There were a couple of dropped lines and one minor sound cue that went missing, but nothing that anyone would notice. And as it turns out, heart attack man hadn’t actually had a heart attack at all, just a bout of dizziness brought on by high blood pressure… Still, we couldn’t help feeling as though we’d been seriously upstaged. Light a candle to Saint Genesius that tonight goes a little smoother.
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