I have a lot of stories from my time at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Being in a company running shows for months and months together, a lot of crazy things happen. I remember once, or maybe a couple of times, a sword separated from its hilt and flew off toward the audience. Luckily, it went down the vom and not into the audience. I remember one “Romeo & Juliet” that had a water fountain in the center of the set, and they staged a sword fight around the fountain. The actors were slipping all over the water. Dangerous. I’m surprised they didn’t “strike” that. Then one time when Tybalt was killed, lying dead on the stage, Lady Capulet came out to hug her dead cousin. Her costume had a lot of jewels decorating the front of it. She lifted him and hugged him when as she put him back down, his wig had gotten caught on all of the jewels. His “hair” was attached to her chest. He was now on the ground, bald, and belly-laughing instead of playing dead. Of course, so was the audience. I remember two actors doing a funny bit in “Bold Stroke for a Wife”, where they kept walking toward the audience and then they took one step over the stage’s edge, paused, and backed up. They did it in such a way that it looked like they were just going to keep walking off the stage. A few nights women in the front row screamed at them, which made the audience laugh hysterically. There was an English actor named John Milligan who had also worked in Australia. He’d been there for years. If he lost a line in a Shakespeare play he could just recite gobbledygook in perfect iambic pentameter. One afternoon John and I were sitting in the green room and he was regaling me with theatre stories, as he always did. Then he looked over at the monitor to see what was going on on the main stage. “As You Like It” was in performance, and he was a Shepard in that production. He was checking where they were, so he would not miss his entrance.  He then said to me, “Oh, look this is my scene”, and kept sitting there waiting to watch himself on the monitor. Finally, he realized that he wasn’t going to see himself because he had to get his arse on that stage. You could hear him calling for his sheep from way far away as he ran through the cavernous backstage area out onto the stage. A late entrance. It was in Alabama, in the 1980s, that I first heard audiences talking back to Actors. I know there’s a push these days to allow that to happen, but as an audience member, and as an actor, most of the time it is incredibly violating to me when I hear it. Even though I’m in a large group of people and it’s OK to laugh or boo or hiss when we’re all together, I don’t want people talking to interrupt my experience of the play. As an actor, it can really throw you. Sometimes it helps you, but most of the time it throws you. I remember after a production of Fugard’s “Master Harold and the Boys”, one of the black actors came on stage afterward for the talkback and scolded the primarily black young school audience that had been there that matinee. He told them that they were behaving like… well, he used the N-word. It was the first time I’ve ever heard it used in public. And this was before the black community started taking back that word, owning it themselves. There was one time it did not bother me though. I was on stage in “Streetcar”. Stanley had just finished yelling “Stella, Stella”. I came out on the balcony and stood there looking at him. This matinee, filled with young students, all started yelling at me, “Oh no, don’t you do it, don’t you go down there. No!” Inside I was laughing, though I remained calm. I knew that my character was winning that scene. 

There was so much I learned during those several seasons. How to project in a large house of course, how to make an audience listen to you. How to keep pushing forward to the end of thought. Keeping up the pace. How to buy the silence when you need it. I remember one student matinee of “Cyrano” when a student audience was throwing BBs and M&Ms on the stage. I thought it was jewels from my costume falling off until we discovered the source. For “Pericles”, we opened on my birthday. Coincidentally, my character the princess was also having a birthday. So when all the men came to court her and brought her gifts for her birthday, they brought some real gifts. Some of the men’s hats had horns on them and they had put men’s rubbers on them. Of course, the audience couldn’t see that, but I did and it made it hard to control my laughter. The cake that came on stage was an actual birthday cake. During the run of that show there were all sorts of games the Actors would play to keep themselves on their toes. One evening we were tasked with saying the name of one of the baseball players in the Red Sox. Mine was Carl Yastrzemski. I had to make the word Yastrzemski fit in iambic pentameter. Somehow I did it. One of the hardest things I had to do in “Pericles” was to lie dead. The more you thought about whether an audience could see you breathing, the more stressed you got, and the more your breathing increased. I had to do my best to not think, but if you zoned out too much you would fall asleep on stage. I found that about every 3-4th show, that extra stress would start my eyes twitching. The other actors could see it happening, but the audience couldn’t. It was very stressful. I have had to play dead before, but never had issues like this one. Once an actor gets something in their mind about a show, it becomes like a ritual, it is hard to change it.  Many actors get superstitions about the show they are in. 

My time at Alabama was Magical.