Rants from Tech Week

This week is tech week for A Christmas Carol, which is why I haven't spent too much time writing. I've been spending too much time at rehearsal, instead. Fortunately (and unfortunately), our theater is also the Masonic temple, and the Masons have the hall for their meeting the first Wednesday of the month, which I'm not going to say anything more about, because I would like to survive until the run begins. (Just kidding! Freemasons would never use violence, under any circumstances. Please don't send the ninjas!)

So, we've run through the entire play exactly ONE TIME. We open this Friday. We had our first run-through cancelled due to freak bad weather, and then there was Thanksgiving, and then there was the director not coming back until Tuesday after Thanksgiving, and now, here we are. It's utterly terrifying.

I was a not-so-Bad Actress on my week off. I went over my lines. I wrote them out long-hand, to keep them prominently in my mind. I thought about my characters, too, and I tried to incorporate a couple of new physicality elements for each. So I'm proud to say that, given the emotionally charged scenes that I handle in the show, I feel pretty well up to the task.

That said, I came the closest I ever have to murdering a fellow actor. Part of the reason our run-through was so stressful was that we didn't start until after 8. We were called at 6:30. One of the main roles didn't show until one and a half hours late, because he was buying shoes for the show. And he didn't think there'd be rush hour traffic, because rush hour is not a regular occurance on weekdays in major U.S. metropolitan areas between 5 and 7 when people get off from work that has been happening for decades, and probably literally this person's entire lifespan. No, this is a new and unprecedented phenomenon that no one could possibly have predicted.

And so a bunch of responsible adults, and some responsible children, lost an hour and a half of their lives that they can never get back. We couldn't run over any scenes, because the missing guy was key to all the ones that needed work. He didn't even apologize. He's been late for every single rehearsal, predictably, by thirty minutes. As one of the more experienced people in the show, I was very tempted to lay it out for him: "Look, these are the requirements: show up on time, know your lines, don't be an ass. Live up to them, or I will kill you and play Cratchit. Don't think I won't."

I think I wrote this entire spiel in hopes of getting a more sympathetic jury.