Performance Report Seven

This from the performance report for the seventh performance of When We Are Married at the Cider Mill.

Great show! Wonderful audience!

Laura Knochen-Davis came tonight to make announcement about Gala Event.

-Toward the end of the show tonight a cat got into the theater somehow and ran up the stairs to the center section of the house. The audience laughed and scared it so it ran back toward the front door. Jessica was going to let it out when Debbie told her it might be dangerous since the show was almost over and the audience would be leaving. So, Jessica brought the cat backstage and put him in the old costume shop until the show was over. I am taking him home tonight.

When We Are Married

It’s your twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, your ‘silver’ wedding. You have gathered with two other couples, dear friends over the years by virtue of the fact that you were all married on the same day, during the same ceremony, twenty-five years ago. Spirits are high, life is good, you have all done well for yourselves and hold respectable positions in the tight knit rural community. Suddenly you find out that the clergyman who joined you on your wedding day was not qualified to do so. You are not married in the sight of the State or God. You’ve been living in sin lo these many years and if this information gets out, you’ll be the laughing stock of the town and forever disgraced.

This is the central situation in J.B. Priestly’s comedy, When We Are Married. Today’s audiences may forget the shame that came with cohabitation only fifty years ago. They may not feel the panic that fuels the chaos of Priestly’s play. Indeed, some may wish some fluke would let them gracefully out of their own marriage. This is probably the greatest challenge faced in remounting When We Are Married.

I tend to think that this will be a momentary hitch for the audience as it watches these self-satisfied, pompous, loveable goofballs squirm under the realization that their reputations might be tarnished. They gobble up a goodly dose of humble pie and then, in the fashion of comedies throughout time, catastrophe is avoided with the realization that a registrar was on hand to record the marriage and his presence made it all legal even if the Parson’s didn’t. The couples come back together, altered for the better because of the trauma, and all is well in Clecklewyck, a fictitious town somewhere in the West Riding, England.

I’ve been busy being a director for a while. Strangely enough it seems like full circle without the necessary return to a starting point. I was intending to be a director as early as undergraduate school, but was sidetracked by making a living as a stage manager and then falling in love with acting. Now, returning to directing, gives me a chance to exercise those other facilities. While stage managing I was able to watch a fair amount of prominent directors take a cast from first rehearsal to opening, including Garland Wright, Dan Sullivan, Robert Egan, Robert Allen Ackerman, Des McAnuff, and others in the opera world. It is fun to notice the cherry picked qualities of some of these role models show up in my rehearsal demeanor. Directing activates a whole different region of the brain. It’s not nearly as fun as the experiential rush you get from acting, which requires you to activate your mind and body, senses and emotions, and put them through imagined circumstances in such a way as to appear to live through fictitious events. Directing is sitting in the house and watching. Sure, you read the play in advance, make myriad choices about what the production will look like, focus on, emphasize, etc. Then there is the first part of rehearsal where you are educating the cast about the decisions made and trying to get everyone on the same page. But quickly it passes and you are relegated to observer, stewarding the story, honing clarity, helping moments as you can. And the playing is left to others, those magical folk, without whom the Theatre would not exist, the actor.