Ah Tech Week, that magical time when actors and directors and producers and stage crew spend nearly every waking hour at the theater working out all the bugs they knew about, finding new ones and working through those as well.  It’s a time of laughter and tears and yelling and making up – or at least putting on a good face.  This has been my world for the past week as Left Coast Theatre Co. prepares for its latest production – I’m Not OK, Cupid, a collection of seven new one-act comedies in which I play two roles.  

Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to matter how good a show is, tech week is filled with dread and second-guessing.  Every mishap onstage or note from a director becomes a harbinger of possible disaster.  Actors get completely discombobulated by having to deal with actual props and furniture instead of the substitutes they’ve used through weeks of rehearsals (This is a butter knife.  I need a butcher knife!) or by seeing one another in costume and make-up rather than street clothes (Oh my God, that’s your costume?).  They forget lines, get uncontrollable giggles and fear that they’ll never pull it together again.

A few nights ago during a run-through, the stage went silent during one of my scenes.  I was a little annoyed that someone had forgotten a line or missed an entrance.  (How unprofessional!)  After a moment, it dawned on me that I was the one who’d blown it.  (Don’t judge me!)  I managed to say something to get us back on track.

The thing to remember is that stage time is different from real time.  Stage time is fluid.  When things are going smoothly, you’re in your rhythm and the audience is with you, two hours go by like two minutes.  When something goes wrong, two seconds feel like two days.  Probably has something to do with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, but that’s a little deep to go into here.

There is nothing like the terror of those silences– especially when no one’s quite sure what happened.  I call them “curling smoke moments” after a particularly vivid experience I had about ten years ago.  I was in a play in which I had to smoke.  I was sitting on a sofa, cigarette in my right hand when one of the other actors dropped a line that set up the next page of dialogue then exited.  I remember sitting there for what seemed like hours and I’m convinced I could actually hear the smoke curling up from the cigarette.  I knew I was going to have to do something because all of the other actors had turned upstage toward me with faces like deer in headlights.  Finally I blathered something that was not nearly as clever as I would have liked and we lurched ahead.

I know, it sounds terrible.  And in the moment it kind of is.  But it’s also kind of exhilarating to see if and how you can get out of those moments.  As a tireless self-criticizer, I mentally beat myself to death with ways I could have done better, then I remind myself that the important thing is to have gone on.  The worst thing in the world you can do in the theater is fall apart when something goes wrong.  Things will go wrong and sometimes you will be inspired in the way you handle them; other times, you won’t be so smooth or you’ll be so thrown you’ll have to depend on a cast mate to save you.  Keep going and it’s possible the audience won’t even notice – or they’ll have forgotten by the end of the show.

Lucky for me, I’m Not OK, Cupid is a great show.  Knowing that helped me get through the rough patches this week and it’s got me excited for our opening tonight.  If you’re in the Bay Area between now and our closing on May 4, come and check us out.  (www.leftcoasttheatreco.org)