The Show Must Go On

Being from the most beautiful part of the world, adjusting to life in Ontario (specifically Toronto) has been a bit of a struggle. Always one to try and find the silver linings I have turned my face to the sky above my current coordinates in search of gratitude and found here not silver linings but big dark grey electro-magnetically charged ones.

The best part about Ontario is the thunder and lightening. There is an abundance of energy in the summer, it pulses through the sky and explodes at intervals into strips and sheets of pink, purple and white light. The sky rocks big base beats and as it gets closer the storm gets further in, when right over head you can feel it in your bones. Sometimes these sights and sounds come out of a dry sky, other times (like now) there is a flash flood than can last for 5 minutes or 5 hours. I have never seen anything like it (and having hometowns on Vancouver Island and Northern England, the two rainiest places on earth, that is a BIG statement). And I LOVE it. It is inspiring, shocking, sexy and full of the guts of life. And sometimes it will catch you just at the moment when you need the hand of Thor (!) to pull you up and dust you off and in some way renew or surprise you into living in the cracks again.

Today is Saturday, which means a two show day. 2:30 matinee and 8 o’clock evening performance. The one I’m working on right now is pretty full-on in a lot of ways, my character's journey spans from age 7-24 and in every show I re-discover how physical I can get with it; for example today I thought that I pulled my groin halfway through Act II. I did not thankfully! But something else completely unexpected happened during the matinee, something so big even me in my “show must go on” mind thought it would derail us or as a result the show would be stopped by stage management.

I had just run off stage right followed by the lead character in an effort to stop her son/my husband from killing his brother (tricky tricky... they don’t know they’re brothers! Twins! She gave one of them away at birth and they found each other and became friends, well we all did... until my husband went to jail for assisting in an armed robbery turned murder, got addicted to anti depressants after which I started up an affair with the secret other brother... CRAZY!). So its the last 8-10 minutes of the show, we have just run off and the Narrator is singing and BANG! The power goes out. He doesn’t miss a beat or a note (even though lights disappear and the monitors and speakers for the band cut out and he had no music to sing to) and the next scene begins as dim emergency lights kick in. Back stage and side stage we have front of house people and stage management running around trying to make decisions as to whether to continue or not. At this point I am usually at the back of the theatre waiting to enter at the final moments to witness both my husband and lover die (serious Greek tragedy style). Three of the front of house ladies enter the theatre from the back with giant flashlights, shining them on the action so the audience can see the scene unfold. I guess we are pressing on.... So I put all thoughts of: “What will happen when the band is supposed to come in for the final number?” “Will we sing acapella?” or “What if the power kicks in mid scene or song” or “Is the audience so far out of the suspension of disbelief that all of this will be a farce now?” as far out of my mind as I can and follow the lead of my fellow cast mates.

In the bare minimally lit theatre it got more real not less. There was no band, no lights, nothing but people telling a story and it burned me under my skin. A haunting, harsh, and visceral portrait emerged from the raw acapella song of a mother in anguish. There was nothing to hide behind and there could be no pretending that you weren’t just a person on a stage telling a story, there could be no trickery, no big show. It didn’t matter that the sounds of the gun shots had to be yelled by our stage manager, it honestly didn’t. Live theatre is a magnificent thing when its on this sort of cusp of vulnerability and paper thin flooring. Everyone did their part, the final number emerged from within every member of the cast without help of piano and at times imperfect in its harmonies but so much more perfect than any other time in my artists soul opinion. I didn’t feel badly for the audience who saw the show that “went all wrong”, because it didn’t go wrong at all. I was so proud and so pleased that truth was born; and shoved into the present moment the cast was unified in the simple purpose of fulfilling the journeys of these characters and closing the book on the bed time story we had started.

It will never be for me just “that show where the power went out”, this afternoon restored some mis placed faith and reminded me that this work is a valid offering and has potent and powerful potential. And when I changed out of my costume the hairs on my arms and neck were still all pointed upwards to the sky, to the thunder, to the lightening, to the gods, to the rains that came to wash away the excess and leave me naked and new again.