jethrien

Or at least, that's the lesson I learned from our play today.

So our murder mystery play was this afternoon. Overall, went well. I didn't drop a line (which I was worried about, since it's the first acting I've done since middle school and we only had two weeks of rehearsal), and we did pretty well under the circumstances. People seemed to have a good time, and the plot stayed coherent, and people mostly stayed in character.

We did have a couple major mishaps, though.

-I was wearing a flapper dress, with all the fringe. In the first five minutes of the play, I semi-collapse, wailing, on my late husband's coffin. We had run this with the coffin, but after our last rehearsal, they added a bunch of fake flowers in front of it. Well, when I went to step away from the coffin, the fringe caught on the flowers. And I got stuck. I started trying to pull away, and the flowers came with me. Now I've got two stems of plastic flowers swinging from the bottom of my dress. Thirty seconds of desperate ad-libbing later, and my step children managed to detach them by basically ripping them apart. I still had a handful of flowers, so I kinda ad-libbed my way back onto script as if I were supposed to be carrying flowers. And then they got stuck again. (Later, after I'd been shot, I spent a good two or three minutes removing plastic bits from the dress.)

- One of the other actors did not know his lines. He flubbed a whole bunch of them, and we managed to ad-lib around a lot of it. But what really annoyed me was that at one point, he managed to jump from the line he was supposed to be delivering to an entirely different line later in the show. There was no logical way to get back to where we had been, so I followed him. We managed to move on fairly seamlessly, but ended up skipping a full page of dialogue. It wasn't anything that was too critical to the plot - we managed to work in bits later - but we did lose a couple of the best lines in the play. I'm still really annoyed at him. The rest of us managed to learn our damn lines.

- I'm supposed to get shot from off stage. Only, when Chuckro tried to shoot me...the gun didn't go off. He tried over and over and over, while I desperately tried to make up dialogue to cover. He tried the first gun. He tried the next gun. He tried the third gun. I think someone finally just yelled bang, and I fell over. (The guy who was supposed to catch me almost dropped me, since he no longer had any idea when I was going to fall.) Then, everyone's supposed to come back on and fire their guns together. Only now, every single gun has had every single cap fired, without a sound. So they kinda end up yelling "bang" again. I was lying there, trying to be dead, and pretty much convulsing because I was laughing so hard and trying to not make a sound.

So, yeah. Hardly a flawless performance. But none of the problems were my fault, and the audience seemed to feel they'd gotten their money's worth (it's a church fundraiser, hardly the most professional setting ever), so I'm too concerned. And hey, because I left the stage early, the kitchen ladies fed me ice cream before anyone else got dessert.