Terrified. Just puttin’ it out there.

I just got home from tonight’s rehearsal for The Pillowman and my gut is in knots.  I’m trying to think back to the last time I’ve felt nerves this badly, and the only example I can come up with is Macbeth at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, when cast illness demanded that I cram the long Bleeding Captain speech that begins the play and deliver it to a very full audience with about a day’s notice and almost no rehearsal.  That experience made me physically ill, but I also remember it as one of the most exhilarating and fantastic theatrical moments of my life.

We’re about 48 hours away from opening this show and my nerves are conspiring against me.  For reasons that are too numerous to mention, the technical facets of putting the show together have been a little slow, and that has cut into some of the time I really wanted to use to get comfortable with cues and quick-changes and backstage traffic.  I’m the sort of actor who claims to be quite easy-going, but is in reality rather easily thrown off by new things; I’d like to say that this is because my body and brain love reacting to new stimulus, but the truth is that I just kinda seize up and occasionally panic under stress.  It’s more proof of my introversion (nobody believes me when I tell them I’m an introvert!), and it’s why working rush hour waaayyyyy back in my golden days of KFC was such a comedy gold mine for anyone who didn’t have to deal with me directly.  In technical rehearsals, where we’re jumping from place and place for the sake of the production team, and all the “acting” goes out the window, it’s very easy to get lines wrong and skip things; it’s very hard to remind myself that these are problems that happen in tech, and not indicators that my knowledge of the play is somehow slipping away from me.

I don’t remember any role I’ve ever played that has this much text associated with it — it truly is Hamlet-esque in its scope, though Hamlet doesn’t have monologues that go on for ten minutes at a time.  Those monologues are a rather hefty source of my dread.  The bulk of the play is completely under control, but there are two scenes that feature plentiful, rapid-fire technical elements, and those elements depend on me nailing a very large number of specific in- and out-cues.  If I drop a phrase or even mix up a few words, I impact several other actors and a stage management team, and I create a cataclysm.  Couple that with my delightful ability to be distracted by several new things happening at once, and you have a recipe for stomach ulcers.  The solution to this, for me, is rehearsal time; I fear that we’re a little short on that at this point, so we have to make the best of it.  I’ll probably mock up both of those scenes in my living room in the morning and run them repeatedly, with whatever stand-in props and costume bits I can find, until I’m relatively happy with my ability to navigate them.

Listen: a post like this runs the risk of reflecting negatively on the production or on the people involved with it.  I am in continual awe of the amount of passion and work Vision Theatre is putting into The Pillowman: the constraints that cause this kind of situation are inevitable resource constraints, and this is what happens to companies that are trying to do fine, epic work on tight budgets.  I am certain it’ll all come together and we’ll be in great shape for opening… but I’m terrified, and I’m just putting it out there.  I’m not ashamed at all to do so.

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