Patron of the Arts

I recently went to see a local community theater production of “Of Mice and Men.”  It was good, though some of the performances were lacking.  The theater holds around 200, and about 2/3 of the seats were filled.  The non-balcony seats were only about nine rows deep, so even in the last row, you were pretty up-close-and-personal with the actors.

One thing I found interesting was how, because I was one of only about 130 people there, I felt an increased pressure to applaud loudly – not because I enjoyed the play so much… but because I felt appreciative of their effort for so few of us.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was very entertaining.  I just didn’t want them to feel bad if they didn’t get that much applause.  Maybe this stems from my stint in “treading the boards” in college.  Yes, my friends, for a brief time I was a thespian.

Now mind you, I went to Georgia Tech… not quite the womb of many future Academy Award winners, so I won’t fault you for not being too impressed.  I actually only got into it because my French professor was giving us extra credit for volunteering to be a part of her French Drama Troupe… all four of us (and yes, it was all in French).  When I showed up for the first meeting and acting coaching session, I got a good picture of what was to come, and everything I did from that point on was coupled with a sense of fear and dread.

The first exercise she made us do was to walk around in a circle and silently act as if we are looking at some odd object on the ceiling and then try to, without using words, describe it to each other.  We looked like the scene from “2001: A Space Odyssey” where the apes are investigating that big, black monolith.  I don’t know how I kept from busting a gut laughing.  I don’t remember much from college, but I still vividly remember everyone’s faces from that exercise.

The play we were slated to do was entitled “Le Pot de Fleurs” or “The Pot of Flowers.”  It was a short, artistic satire on the trappings of modern life that somehow involved a pot of flowers.  I don’t remember much of it, but somewhere in the play the main character’s arms get pulled off, after which she performs a short, armless soliloquy before the curtain falls.  I was the guy who smoked a cigar and pulled off her left arm.  I remember that, because all the lines were in French (of which I had only one semester under my belt), I really didn’t understand completely what I was saying, but I practiced smoking very cheap cigars for weeks.

The professor was so excited to be putting on this play that I think she overlooked our obvious lack of talent and the limited potential audience for the performance.  She actually was able to reserve the university’s performance auditorium for it.  Not only that, she took out an ad in the school paper, posted fliers around campus, and beseeched all the other language department professors to encourage their students to attend .  I don’t know how many engineers you’ve seen trying to perform drama, but trust me, there was nowhere this was going to go but bad.  I think each of the troupe members wanted to shake her and try to snap her out of her delusion, but none of us had the courage.

Soon enough, opening night arrived. 

So what do you get when you try to put on a very modern, satirical black comedy, completely spoken in French, at a school full of engineers on a Friday night?  Yes, you get two audience members, that’s what… only one of whom understood French, and I think the other one got extra credit from the same French professor for attending the play.  They sat dead center in the auditorium.  I think it was the first time in the school’s dramatic history where the cast members outnumbered the audience members by a ratio of 2-to-1. 

But the show must go on.

The rest of the evening was a blur.  I remember hearing one laugh from one of the two guys somewhere in the middle of the play in response to a joke and it startling me enough to cause me to stutter on one of my lines.  But I powered through, and eventually we reached the end and took our bows.  You know… there’s something quite sad in bowing to two people applauding as loud as they can and being able to hear the individual claps.  I felt bad for wasting their time.

The professor took us all out for pizza afterward – cast and audience.  I think she was actually proud of us… never mind that our opening night was also our closing night.