A Moment of Silence

I’m waiting for two reviews and it’s making me a little crazy. I’ve never been big on the silence. This came to a head Saturday night. The show I co-star in “Things Being What They Are” ran last Friday, Saturday and Sunday and well, two out of three ain’t bad in that sense.

Obviously I’m not bending your eye to talk about the good performances.

For openers, our Saturday night performance had an audience of twelve. Well, eleven and a reviewer anyway.

SIDEBAR: There’s a thing you might not know about audiences. People have an inherent awareness of how obvious they are. All by themselves they tend to be quiet and unobtrusive. Normally this is a good thing. Riots spark when angry people happen in large numbers. There is an anonymity to the crowd that allows behaviors one might otherwise not indulge. Flipping police cars is one such behavior.

Laughter is another.

An audience of twelve makes it easier to see and highlight the actions of any one of its members. (“That woman in the second row snorts when she laughs.” Y’know what I mean?) In an audience of twelve, most are going to bite their tongues for fear of embarrassment.

Such was the audience last Saturday night.

SIDEBAR: I once performed a play to an entirely empty house. The author/lead had rented the theatre at a high personal cost (including a stipend for me, the supporting actor/director.) What he didn’t do was advertise. People stayed away in droves. Besides, he was going to videotape the performance. It was a strange thing to play to an empty house.

Saturday night was worse. When no one is there, a lack of laughter is no surprise. When you can hear them breathing out there, the lack of laughter is the only thing you can hear. It is louder than your co-star, louder than your own voice in your ears; louder than just about anything.

Just about.

We’re pounding away through the show, hoping like crazy that they are all smirking in quiet amusement, but there is a palpable distraction in struggling to gauge the audience reaction.

That was where I was at when I stumbled. My character had a lot of lines with repetitive wording and even more with repetitive intent. My character was the second fiddle through most of the play. I had a number of lines like “Uh-huh”, “Sure” and “Oh” that happen more than once. There are also a number of questions I ask to goad the other character along and theoretically, to keep him on track. They mostly boil down to, “And then what happened?”

Generally, they had more finesse and context. In one particular case, my co-star is explaining about some news that his ex-wife had shared with him. After a quick guess and rebuke on my characters part, I was supposed to re-prompt him with, “So, what was the news?”

I was so busy listening for a reaction from the audience that I dropped the specific words of my question. Instead, I ran with, you guessed it, “And then what happened?”

An argument could be made that one question was as good as another in this case. His answer would have flowed seamlessly to either. But I would not be making that argument. The author chose the words for a reason and we actors take our cues from specific words and inflections.

The net result of my “And then what happened?” was a joint seizure on the part of my co-star and myself.

The unresponsive crowd became totally silent. I would swear to you that they were not breathing. They might very well have been holding their collective breath; possibly in sympathy, but potentially in a shared mortal fear with those of us on stage (not to mention our director on the soundboard) that we would all never speak again and thus be trapped in the theatre forever.

I could feel my face burning. I could see my fellow actor glancing about futilely for anything that might give him direction.

An old stage trick is to take a step back and repeat a moment to recreate the correct cue. Unfortunately in my panic, I forgot what the hell we were talking about.

SIDEBAR: There is a veteran local actor whose last name has become a verb. For the purposes of this story, we will call him Bob Gumb. He does wonderful doddering old characters, but, in his autumn years, has begun to drop the occasional line. When this happens, he stares at other actors on the stage, announcing to all the audience that it was one of them whom is responsible for the miss. The direct recipient of his portentous glance will evermore understand what it means to be “Gumbed”.

I felt like I was “gumbing” my co-star, my partner, my one-time friend. The silence stretched on for what felt like seven years (though I suspect less than a minute). We were very nearly frozen, he and I, though we were running around our own minds screaming “What comes next!?”

Eventually, I remembered another line from the show that had a very obvious end cue and I went after it.

It worked. The audience began breathing again, though never got to a level where they felt safe laughing.

I didn’t go out for drinks that night because I did not know what would stop me once I got started.

The review for Saturday night could only be described as charitable. The offending silence was never mentioned though the overall review was not wildly favorable.

There were two reviewers there Friday night for a pretty good show with a freely laughing audience. Unfortunately, there were none for the Sunday matinee where we totally killed.

Still, I am waiting for two reviews and cocking an eyebrow as I look toward next weekend

Heaven help us all.