Until Thursday night, my only performance on stage in 2013 was for a 24 Hour Theatre showcase in the upstairs studio at the Long Beach Playhouse. That makes it over eight months since my last performance of Much Ado About Nothing at Zombie Joe’s Underground. Eight months shouldn’t seem like much since I effectively took over a decade away from any real pursuit of acting after college. But the volume of work brought on by the last couple of years has drastically and, maybe permanently, overwritten my expectations. Now it’s conspicuous if I don’t have a play coming up.
And nothing against those studio and storefront spaces from my last couple of shows, but walking onto a amphitheater stage with a couple hundred people in the crowd is an entirely other level of energy. It is nuclear. As soon as I entered for my first scene, I felt like someone had put the shock paddles to my chest. But that’s a good thing; it’s me back doing something that makes life a lot more thrilling and fun.
It’s still startling even after having done this a few times, that for weeks my mental image of the play was defined by all of us in T-shirts and jeans over in the rehearsal studio at Chapman University, with stage areas taped on the carpet, just trying to create the world and mood with only what we give each other as actors. The first time I saw one of the publicity photos taken on Wednesday night, with costumes, makeup, lights, fog, and all, it totally transformed the experience. “This,” I suddenly thought, “is going to be AWESOME.”
Doing a tragedy, especially one as brutal and unrelenting as Maccers is, can make it difficult sometimes to know if you’ve got the audience’s attention. They’re sure not going to laugh very often (though we managed a couple). This time, though, it didn’t feel like a problem. As soon as our Weird Sisters started their howling, the crowd was ready for the ride. Some guy in the crowd showed up wearing a kilt – just because.