Theater 101

Having survived the first week and slim crowds on opening weekend, The Good Doctor is doing quite well. Kim had to replace two actors the week the play opened with one of them starting right off on opening night and the other taking over his new role just last night on the first performance of our second weekend. Surprisingly, and with much relief, our replacement actors both preformed as if they had been rehearsing for a month instead of the one and two weeks they actually had. I was very proud of these two talented young people for coming in at the last minute and working hard to rescue our show.

Of course, for me, Ryan’s performance is wonderful, and like his grandfather said, it’s just too bad that he can’t make a living at acting. He probably could if he didn’t care so deeply for paying his bills. Ryan plays the part of the writer and narrator of the nine vignette type stories. His character is supposedly the playwright, Neil Simon or perhaps Russian storywriter, Anton Chekhov, the inspiration for Simon’s play. The writer is supposed to be writing the short stories he and the rest of the troupe is acting out throughout the evening. It is a most entertaining performance by Ryan and the rest of the cast.

This play has taught me a lot about putting a show together under different circumstances from which we were previously accustomed. Our beloved Little Theater was comfortable from the standpoint of having a moderate collection of props and costumes at our ready disposal. That is not to say that we didn’t have to construct or search for an appropriate prop or call on a seamstress to sew up a dress or suit every now and then. Though for the most part, our theater attic housed a treasure of stuff to browse through as if visiting a flea market. I missed the convenience of simply climbing the pull-down staircase to venture into the emporium likeness of our theater’s attic.

A lot of back and forth between the church-turned theater, our garage and the old theater set shop took place during the construction of our sets. Being a bit displaced, Kim and other cast members, cut and hammered wood for flats and platforms in our garage. We painted the completed products inside of the church fellowship hall working hard to keep paint off of the floors. I brought furniture pieces home to apply painted stencils and then went back to the theater set shop where I sweated in our Texas heat to apply stencils to our flats that were awaiting transport to the church. It is a relatively simple set, but nice.

The biggest challenge of all for working on this play was the sharing of the building with a religious group that was also renting the space. They were in the building first and we have tried to accommodate and respect their scheduled activities in the building by striking our set before each Wednesday and Sunday. This weekend is particularly difficult because we have a matinee on Sunday afternoon. This means that we not only strike after the performance Saturday night, we then have to return as soon as the church group has completed their Sunday morning services, to reset our stage for the matinee. Even though our set is not too difficult to put up and take down, it does take time and hands of several helpers to get the job done.

At the end of our run in another week, I just hope we won’t be forgotten. The Good Doctor has been a good play. It wasn’t a big musical and not near as many people have come to support us as did Titanic that took place right after the crash, but I think the ones that see it, will be glad they saw the first show of this 2007-2008 BLT season.