My teenagers nearly killed me tonight. I say that as if they are “my” children, all fifteen of them, gaggling and giggling and struggling to perform on stage. We all worked so hard, put in an extra sunday rehearsal, struggled to memorize those lines, and boom, we showed up at the theater. This show broke new ground for me. Let me tell you, there are very little plays out there for teenagers, let alone fifteen teenagers. The only plays I could find were terrible early 90’s crap with an after-school special feeling…while plays like “Alki”, “The Hood,” and “Juvy” may have their place in the world of playwrites writing for young adults, I felt no love or inspiration for their tired, dry, cheesy scripts. So I found a short absurdist piece and had the kids perform it three different times with three different casts of five. The first cast played it straight, the second cast played it as a gender-bending musical, and the third cast performed the entire play in the audience. It was highly ambitious and, at times, too challenging for this group of young amateurs.
Dress rehearsal is notoriously bad…in fact if dress actually runs good than that’s a terrible omen. Dress rehearsal is the time for the blank, “deer-in-the-headlights, DEAR GOD, what are my lines?” moment that permates the stage. Each one of them had that moment, the moment of all moments where every line they memorized flies out of their head and they stare blankly into space hoping it will come to them, (cue the sound of crickets chirping away during the silence). Dress rehearsal is when the fly of every kid seems to have been left accidentally open, every dress strap has fallen down onto every shoulder, and yes…my young man in drag almost lost his wig. (Wanna quick laugh? Cast a man as a woman and let him rock it in a dress). Dress rehearsal is when I can’t sit still, I’m whispering furiously to the light and sound guy in the booth, using a galactic looking headset–which is bad news when I have to yell out to the kids onstage and subsequently yell into the ear of the lighting designer as well.
A kiddie swimming pool was placed onstage for the second act…the pool is a death trap. (OK, I’m being dramatic.) Basically the pool is terribly slick, no traction on the underside, and I watched in horror as the young lady onstage performed a flying grande jete into the pool and the whole thing slid across the floor causing her to eat shit on the ground. Luckily she was not harmed, but for the rest of the rehearsal she suffered from chronic “poolphobia” where she could barely approach the thing without the fear of it sliding out from underneath her. We solved the problem by cutting out the entire base of the pool with scissors.
During the trecherous dress rehearsal, their staging was all wrong. They forgot to smile. They had mini-teenage-panic attacks. But through it all, the cast stuck together and pulled off a remarkable show. It goes down in the history books for me…I really wasn’t sure if it was going to work out. One of our newer kids brought down the house with his slurring character of The Drunk. Another tap danced and shuffled her way through fast costume changes and plastic candy cane props. The guy dressed up as a girl was a huge hit. It worked! And they gave me flowers…and a big ass chocolate bar. Which is always nice…