This was a minor theatre venture during the summer of 2013, at the same time as the run for Young Frankenstein and rehearsals for Evita. However, it is worth mentioning because it was my first show of any sort in the city of Sonoma. This show was part of the Sonoma Theatre Alliance season and was also the inaugural new play festival for them. 84 plays had been submitted and 12 were selected. I first heard about this from a Facebook event post by my friend Chris Ginesi. He and, as I found out at auditions, two other friends of mine, Nick Christenson and Jessica Short, were also directing a short one act or ten-minute play in this festival of readings of new works. The purpose of this festival was to read them for an audience who would then vote on the ones they liked the most because the winners would be given a fully staged production in September. I felt it was worth checking.
I had had experience in reading new plays before at Sonoma State in the three semesters I took a playwriting course. I would go further into detail on those, but that's for another post if I can dig up all those memories. I also had experience from Thomas Madigan and the August Circus (see that post). So, I was no stranger to the experience of staged play readings. However, unlike the times I did the readings for the playwriting class, this time I would have to audition and prove my worth to the directors.
The auditions for this show were the first weekend of April and were in Sonoma at a church, while the show would be taking place at the Sonoma Community Center. They wanted two contrasting monologues which did not have to be memorized. Which was lucky for me because at the time I didn't have any memorized nor did I have the time to memorize. After some searching, I found a couple monologues for characters about my age and took them in. The auditions consisted of standing in front of the directors, of which there were about eleven for twelve plays. Surprisingly, I got a few laughs from my comic monologue. Up to then that had never happened before. Nick Christenson told me afterward that they were very good monologues and that he was tempted to steal them.
Two directors, Monica McKey and Jessica Short, spoke to me about reading the next day for the plays they were directing, The Answer and The Unabridged Kama Sutra, respectively. Another, Karen Devaney, asked me to do her play, He Had Wings as the EMT, who had a couple lines at the very end. I accepted that one. The following day I read the two plays at callbacks. Later that night, I was contacted by the two directors. Monica decided not to use me; Jessica, while not wanting me for Kama Sutra asked me to do another one that she was directing, Horny Like the Wolf. I said I would do it, but I would like to read the script first. She sent it to me. I was laughing out loud while reading it because it was so funny. It centered around an officer who tells a woman her husband died and she is shockingly overjoyed and then tries to seduce him, while he is bewildered and very uncomfortable. After sings the title a la the Duran Duran song, she succeeds in getting him to want to have sex. At that moment her husband arrives alive. Turns out the officer came to the wrong apartment. She asked me to be the officer and there was no doubt in my mind that I was doing it. The role was perfect and too good to pass on.
All that was required for this was a couple rehearsals. I thought they'd take a lot of juggling with my other commitments, but luckily it worked out somewhat since in April and May, rehearsals for Evita were not too frequent. I had two rehearsals for He Had Wings, the first of which was on a night I had off from Young Frankenstein and it was at Karen's house in Sonoma. This play is about a nurse who checks on a WWII vet and is startled to see that he had a problem with his feet and can't walk. The vet relives experiences of the war. His daughter, frustrated at him, has him taken to the hospital at the nurse's urging. Karen decided not to read the stage directions as some directors did in this show and instead decided to utilize my talent and have me do it. She said I had a wonderful reading voice. She never really had notes for me because I was doing my part perfectly. Also cast in this show were Saskia Baur, Sheila Lichirie, and Al Christenson. Our second rehearsal was a couple weeks later, which was when Young Frankenstein was up and running and I was a little more available.
It was around that same week that I was supposed to have my rehearsal for Horny Like the Wolf. Saskia was also in that play along with another actor playing the husband. Unfortunately, it backfired on me because at work they made me work the evening shift that night. Fortunately, Karen and Jessica worked something out. Since my second rehearsal for Wings was only one hour, Jessica came over to Karen's house. She worked with me and Saskia, first by having us read the script and then improving the script with the same idea. It was a lot of fun. Good thing Jessica and I were friends beforehand and she was understanding and also because Karen was very gracious.
The show was designed so that six of the shows would be in the first show and the other six in the second show. I had He Had Wings the first night and Horny Like the Wolf the next day. For dress we were to wear just black. For our dress rehearsal we weren't required to do that. Our dress rehearsal was on a night I managed to get off from Evita rehearsal. Rehearsals for Evita included weekends during the afternoon. The Sunday show for the readings was at two and, very luckily, I was not called to rehearsal that day.
A few times I carpooled with Saskia to and from Sonoma. I always looked forward to that because she and I would chat on and on about our theatre experiences and other Sonoma County theatre news, memories and goings-on. The one downside was that it made the car rides go by too quickly.
Before that weekend I wondered if we'd have a sizable audience for the show. Surprisingly, we did! For both performances we had packed houses, about 30-40 people in the audience (not including the playwrights and directors for the shows that would be presented for that performance). I'm sure we were all pleasantly surprised at that.
Both performances were about two hours. The first night went very well. My show was fourth in line and first after intermission. The only damper for me was that on the way home I did not feel very well in my stomach. It felt like I needed to throw up and when I got home and tried I couldn't. After I laid down on my stomach for a while I felt better.
The second performance was even better. It seemed like the funnier plays were in the second show. The first three brought the audience to a real high. My show was the second one up. In this performance I almost flubbed a line by saying something that would have skipped a section and caused the next few lines to be meaningless, but I caught myself. As they say, "Acting is reacting" and if that's true, then that's what happened in this play. Saskia really held nothing back in her performance, even adding things she hadn't in rehearsals. I had never heard so much laughter in any show I had done up to then, not even the two comic Spreckels shows I had recently done. This probably was the funniest play I ever did, and it was a struggle and at times not to laugh during it. We both got a lot of laughs. Many people congratulated me afterward saying I did a good job.
After both performances the playwrights of that performance had a talk back to the audience for 20-30 minutes. After the show on Sunday, I joined directors Chris Ginesi, Nick Christenson, his parents, the show's stage manager Diane, and my friends Alexis Long and Nora Summers (also acting in the show) at Mary's Pizza Shack for dinner. Nick, Chris and Nora were rehearsing for a show that evening in the same place as this show and had a little time to kill. It was a great time.
This was a wonderful experience. Eventually I found out that neither play I did garnered enough votes to make it to the full staged production. Shame really, because I saw that later on with many of the same actors, and I would've loved the chance to reprise my roles, especially the police officer.
