I'm Back!!!

Finally, the dust has settled a little since the move from NYC. I have some windows of time now, (due to the relative luxury of an academic calandar). The Resident Professional Teaching Associates (RPTA's) are required to put together a showcase to introduce ourselves to the department. This years group decided to share theatre stories along with presenting some monologues and prepared pieces. Here is the story I decided to share.

I started my theatrical career as a stage manager. By the time I was 24, I found myself in New York with a bit of a resume looking for work. I got a gig at the Manhattan School of Music stage managing an opera, my first. Die Nase by Shostakovich, directed by a three hundred pound nut job named Lou Galterio. He watched rehearsals from the back of the house and occasionally would launch himself down the center isle toward the stage crying “NO, NO, NO”.

Having survived that experience the production manager, Carolyn Lockwood decided to take me under her wing. She was a barrel-chested, bourbon drinking Texan who just happened to also be production manager at the Santa Fe Opera, THE premiere summer opera company, located out in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Carolyn brought me to Santa Fe that summer and “showed me how to stage manage an opre”. She was that kind of nurturing presence that every young person needs. I remember sitting at the tech table next to her early in the season. It was late and we’d been at it for hours. During a lull in the action she tapped me on the shoulder, pointed to the stage and said, “who the hell is that?”. I squinted at the stage, trying to make out the distant figure. “I don’t know”, I replied. Carolyn hit me across the skull with the back of her hand. “Get some damned glasses!”. I have been wearing corrective lenses ever since.

One of the lessons Carolyn Lockwood drilled into my head was that when something went wrong in a rehearsal, you went onstage. Immediately. A stage manager calls an opera from backstage not from a booth and Carolyn couldn’t stand not having the stage manager down front if something needed to be worked out. So, whenever something came up, wham! Down would go the headset and I’d be center stage.

When I was twenty-eight I was one of two production stage managers at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. I called four of the eight operas. It was my first season there and my first production was Der Rosenkavalier, a four hour Strauss behemoth. It was final dress rehearsal. The cast was full of giant super stars. International powerhouses. Kurt Moll, Kathleen Battle, Anna Tomova-Sintow, Anna Sophie Von Otter. We had done dress rehearsals of each act but never the whole thing. The final dress was the first, and only time that we went through everything before we opened. I was told that the final dress never stops. Don’t worry. Nothing goes wrong.

I had just called the curtain up on the fourth and final act. Things were going well. The set for the fourth act is this little cabin in the woods that all the main characters are rendezvousing in. There is only one way in to the cabin, through a wooden door. The time came for the bass to make his entrance. No one is onstage. The place in the music comes up and the door rattles. It rattles some more. A louder rattle. A big shake. The music keeps on going but it’s way past when he is supposed to be singing. Finally the conductor cuts off the orchestra. Silence. WHAM! My headset goes down, and BLAM! I’m center stage. Now the other thing that they mentioned about final dress rehearsals, but which hadn’t really sunk in was that they were fully attended. So when I turned to face the auditorium I was face to face with about thirty two hundred well-dressed people. They were all rapt with attention. “Who is this strange little person and what could he POSSIBLY have to tell us?” their faces said. One of the greatest regrets of my life, so far, is that I didn’t have something prepared. A short routine or an anecdote…even a joke. You know, there’s three guys at a bar, an Englishman, an Irishman and an American…

I knew the director, who was German, was in the darkness at the back of the hall. This is a gigantic place. Orchestra, dress circles, boxes, balconies. So I began. (deep breath) It seems, Mr director that we have had some problem with the door… and he picked up a god mic from the tech table. “yes, Dennis we are painfully aware of this fact” (deep breath) what I suggest is that we take the time to fix the door and start just before the Baron’s entrance. “That sounds like an excellent plan Dennis, thank you for making a personal appearance to keep us informed.

So, the door was fixed and we went on. But you know that feeling, when time kind of slows down on you and you get this sort of quasi out-of-body experience? At some point, when I was out there on the lyric opera stage, down center, in front of thirty two hundred attentive faces, an eighty piece orchestra at my feet, a cast and chorus of about a hundred and twenty frozen in the wings, a couple of very nervous carpenters fiddling with screw guns in the background and several slack-jawed producers nearby, I felt curiously…at home. I had finally found my place! Down center! What was I doing spending my life in the WINGS! I belong HERE!!! So I became an actor.