AUGUST 31 I know 90 percent of the sold out audience, stacked full of the cast’s family members and Coast employees. Every joke hits, every song, uh, sings. Amelia’s tossing in beats and hip swings I’ve never seen before, and Matt L has made the audience his bitch. (So, for that matter, has Matt C. Look for Johnny Grace in Touch of Grace at next year’s Fringe.) There’s spontaneous applause after the opening scene for chrissakes.
Afterwards we travel to Rogue’s Roost in the torrential downpour and talk about the show for a long time. It’s all positive and incredibly rewarding.
I get way drunker than I mean to.
SEPTEMBER 1Even though I have yet to get a poster up anywhere in the city, the show sells out. We have to add chairs. I know considerably less people but the crowd is half familiar, at least. (As long as I can spot a single well-wisher I’m good.)
Jenn Grant is our special guest — there is a different one every show, opening it up as a busker, AKA the Find the Victim Scene — and she’s got MacGillivray on guitar and violinist Kinley Dowling with her. Kinley’s bow breaks as they’re warming up. She’s chill about it so it doesn’t serve as any kind of symbolic warning to me.
Jenn’s singing a new song I love, “Heart of Sticks,” and I’ve insisted she play as much of it as possible because hello, but it’s a verse too long, an extra minute of the audience wondering what is happening, and I can feel the crowd leave us behind in that moment of confusion.
People laugh at stuff and clap for Danny’s song and come up to me to say nice things — there’s even extended applause to get the cast to come back out for another bow, but they don’t; I’m not sure if I’m supposed to run out there so I don’t — but anyone who knows the show knows it’s a rough show overall. There’s the feeling of not only the audience not being with you — and I am absolutely not playing Blame the Idiot Audience; sometimes you’ve got ’em, sometimes you don’t — but that feeling manifests itself in the form of missed cues and lines, in other words, a confidence drain. I want to run backstage and shake it off of everyone but I am stranded on the sides willing the show to find its vibe.
I spend the play hoping it’s just me feeling like this.
It’s not.
The post-show crowd at Tom’s Little Havana talks about other things. We laugh and drink and move on.
Fuck it — it’s great to get the off-night out of the way so soon. That means there are two nights of dopeness to go.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2007.