One evening, at the very start of the show, the three actresses playing the three sisters were standing in a triangle on the stage and a lighting fixture fell in the center of that triangle. Not just a gel, but the whole fixture. From that moment on almost anything that could happen, did happen. In every act, one of the actresses’ petticoats fell off under them onto the stage. It was an all-white stage with birch trees lined up on the sides. I was playing Masha, and dressed all in black. In the first act, Irina’s petticoat had fallen off her. In the second act, I felt my petticoat starting to slide down my legs and onto the floor. It felt almost as if I had wet myself and was leaving a wet pile on the floor. To avoid being guilty of it, I kicked the petticoat underneath one of my sister’s dresses standing near me and waltzed away. Later the petticoat of the woman playing Natasha fell off, leaving her in tears, uncharacteristically. Don’t ask me how it was possible. Everything that happened that night was uncanny. In one act Tuzenbach was doing a celebration chair dance. Several chairs were lined up and he was going back and forth across them. Just as the song was ending and he hit the final chair, the chair smashed to the ground. Later when Masha and Kulygin were giving a toast, we clinked the glasses and they shattered. In the third act, the stage floor which could be lowered or raised as needed, was at a 40° rake. An actress playing the maid came on with a candelabra. One of the candles was lifted out of it, seemed to float for a second, then fell and rolled down the stage, still lit, toward the audience. Luckily there was a trough at the end of the stage that caught the candle and it was extinguished there. My favorite one that night was during the love scene between Masha (myself) and Vershinin. We were seated at a table and the main source of light was a huge white candle at the center of the table. Just as the love scene was coming to its climax, this white candle ejaculated a huge spit of wax about 4 feet out toward the audience. Needless to say, we two actors broke and began laughing, or “corpsing”, as it is referred to in England. The audience laughed as well when they finally understood the implication. It took a while for that scene to settle back down. At some time during the show, the actors started going downstairs to the dressing rooms and chanting the name of the Scottish play. Which, as you know, is forbidden to be said in the theater because bad things might happen. If you accidentally say the word you have to do some ritual, as the cast understands it. Usually, you have to go outside, turn around three times, spit over your shoulder, say some words like “angels in heaven defend us” and then knock on the door to be asked back inside. But on this particular evening, the company felt that whatever spirits were doing this on stage that night, might have something else to fight with if we called up the Scottish play’s spirits. Maybe then, all of them would leave us alone.

(Playmakers Repertory Theatre- Director, Gregory Boyd)