I’m trying to think of when it started sinking in: “Everybody Loves Opal will be done soon.” Suddenly, after so many rehearsals and two weekends of performances, my schedule would be almost completely empty. No more evening plans on a near-constant basis. It was like hitting a brick wall on Monday night. Still, we all had a blast doing the play (if anyone didn’t, they hid it very well) and I think it was a worthwhile endeavor.
That said, I’m in kind of a reflective mood, so in writing about some of this stuff… I should probably include a generic POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT! After all, some of you might see a production of Opal somewhere else and those people might not want the audience to know what’s going to happen the entire time. I don’t mind if you find out or not, but I’m trying to be considerate. So again, POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT!
I didn’t get much work done during summer camp. That week was pretty much a wash when it came to learning my lines. I had a lot of fun at camp as usual, but my knowledge of the script didn’t change much between the day I left and the day I returned. I don’t have a calendar, so I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I think with that loss of a week, I had… three fewer weeks to prepare for Opal versus Mind Over Matt? A pretty significant number.
I could feel the difference onstage. When we were performing these last two weekends, I was always thinking, “What’s my next line? It’s coming up here in a second…” It just didn’t feel as fluid. And I don’t think I ever completely screwed up any of my lines before, either. I did on Friday.
It was weird: I was more nervous about the second Friday than opening night. I imagine it was because we’d had a week of dress rehearsals, then moved directly into performances. Between Sunday and the next Friday, we met once for a “speed-through”, which is basically just the cast sitting down and saying their lines, no actions involved. I’m guessing that week away let some rust accumulate in my brain, which led to… ugh.
In a way, I was fortunate. My character, Professor Bradford Winter, went to prison a long time ago because he killed someone while driving drunk. While in prison, “one of his lungs went.” I don’t know whether it collapsed due to the harsh conditions or he got shanked by one of the other prisoners, but given his pompous attitude, I’m leaning toward the latter. Thus, when I started stumbling over my line, I burst into a giant coughing fit—something that happened several times during the first scene of the play—which gave me a chance to regroup. And did I mention that this happened on the night we were taping the show? Yeah…
But I don’t want to focus on the bad stuff. Saturday and Sunday ran soooooo smoothly in comparison. We got offstage to meet the audience afterward and it just felt great. And perhaps the greatest compliment I ever got from people was their hesitance to shake my hand. I knew they were just teasing, but as the baddest bad guy—the last one to “love Opal”, so to speak—I took that as a way of them saying I was pretty bad up there. I mean “bad guy”, not… you know what I mean.
Plus there was the final show. Sunday afternoon. A pretty solid performance and I was happy with it. I was especially happy with it because the last people to leave the theater were members of my family. My 95-year-old grandma was there and I’d asked for tickets in the front row ahead of time so she’d be able to see and hear more clearly. (She didn’t catch all of the words, but being able to see our body language helped.) That also meant the rest of my family was sitting in the front row, too.
Or at least I assume so. I opted not to wear glasses during the production—it was written in the 60’s and the style of my glasses… more modern by 50 years didn’t feel appropriate. I didn’t need to read anything, so I had no problem acting with a bunch of giant fuzzballs onstage. That also meant the audience was comprised of fuzzballs as well, so I had no idea I was staring directly into some of their faces during part of Act II.
Okay, OFFICIAL SPOILER ALERT! (In case you ignored the earlier warnings.)
There were three of us conniving crooks who put a life insurance policy on Opal and wanted to murder her for the insurance money. After each unsuccessful attempt, she believed one of us saved her life, so she lavish that person with love and affection that would eventually be returned. The first person to cave was the girl, Gloria. When Sol and I were planning the second murder attempt, Gloria wanted out. After several failed attempts at coercion and threatened violence, Sol pushed her down to the floor, at which point I walked up, squatted down to get close and delivered this line:
“Maybe Sol won’t kill you, but I promise… if you oppose us in any way, I WILL SLIT THAT SLIM THROAT OF YOURS!”
I used my thumb to make a slashing motion across my throat… you know, just in case she didn’t know what I was getting at. I kept yelling at her as I stood up and walked away, but that part was pretty badass.
Now flash back to the part about my family sitting in the front row. When I delivered that line, I was looking at Gloria and also staring directly at the face of my older brother. When he gave me a hug after the show, he asked me where I was channeling that rage from. That was an even better compliment than people not wanting to shake my hand. (I’ll get back to the rage part in a bit.)
And that was only a part of Act II. It was the hardest one for me to get used to, maybe because I had so much to do: talk to Sol about killing Opal, coerce/threaten Gloria, get Sol prepped for the murder, seduce Gloria (yes, it’s only ten minutes between me threatening to kill her and us making out on the couch), then try to make sure Opal dies. Completely switching emotions and behavior on a dime so many times… that was the exhausting part of the play.
Act III was a lot more fun because I got to be a lot more loose and casual. Professor Winter was terse, stern, proper, snooty, condescending… I could come up with a laundry list of adjectives, but most of them go out the window when I spend all of Act III being drunk. I couldn’t slur my speech very much because I still used a large vocabulary, but stumbling around a bit, doing more random movement, talking louder and acting like a petulant child at times… it was fun. Whether it was more fun than making out on the couch… that’s a toss-up.
Being drunk also meant I could laugh while preparing my own attempt at murder. My evil plan? Drug Opal’s tea to knock her out, then set the house on fire. “It’s a tinderbox!” The first part worked: she passed out with her head on the table. Within the next few minutes, I ran around the room, dragged her out of her chair and fell down on my butt to get her on the floor, poured “kerosene” all over her (well, up to chest level so she wouldn’t get water in her nose), threatened my former cohorts with a pistol when they walked into the room… I did a lot of giggling and some singing in the process. Ultimately, my plan failed, but I enjoyed the attempt.
(As a side note, it was pretty cool to hear the audience gasp when I poured water on Opal so they could see it sloshing on the stage and getting her clothes wet. “That’s right, I’m not just miming pouring this stuff on her!” I’m not sure why they thought it was so shocking, but I thought their reaction was pretty cool.)
Ah, I almost forgot the rage part. I was never in a drunken rage in Act III, but I’ve never been drunk before. At all. Ever. I don’t drink and don’t plan to. Alcohol ain’t my bag, but some people told me to call A.A. after a performance just to make sure. (To create the drunken movement, Andy Wilkins said to pretend like I’m standing on a raft moving around on a lake. You keep your balance by bending your legs and shifting your weight around, so doing that on flat ground makes you look drunk.)
Two things I’ve never been—full of rage and drunk—but I don’t think I “channel” anything. I couldn’t tell you where it comes from. It just seems like the right way to act in that situation. If you’re really pissed at someone, you yell, bare your teeth, clench your fists. If you’re drunk… well, I’ve seen drunk people who can’t walk in a straight line, wobble around, throw up on their shoes. Maybe it comes from being a people-watcher, but it just seems like the right way to respond to those circumstances.
There are plenty of other stories. Sol reading the obituaries, trying to think of ways to kill Opal and making up a different headline every night. Officer Joe Jankie’s first play ever. (The first time he came offstage on opening night, it immediately hit him: “I’m an actor!”) Shuffling people around to ensure we’d have at least two crew members every night—I don’t think any of them made it to all six shows because of schedule conflicts. It was an interesting ride, to say the least.
So to the cast, crew, audience, the kids at summer camp, everyone reading this… probably to the dude who wrote Everybody Loves Opal, too… thanks for the memories. Except for the memory of me screwing up my line. That one, I could do without.
