The Beautiful Johanna

January 21, 2010

Dark before dawn. Seconds ago Circe was purring on my chest and I was coming out of a dream that made me laugh out loud.

If you call last night’s The Beautiful Johanna a dress-rehearsal, then perhaps it was a little troubling, because of the superstition about good dresses and bad openings. But if you call it a preview, as I shall, it was sensational. In one day the performance levels leapt up 100%. My actors were on fire. I thank them. I bless them. I forget to bless the tech people, for they are customarily perfect. The crowd was not quite capacity, but still large, a house I would have been proud of on any night of a run. This I resented slightly, for, its being a preview, the seats were free. I stopped myself from calculating the lost revenue in my head. The other side of it is that it was surely having an audience which helped set the performances on fire, the mere presence of them out there, known to us and expectant, the reason why all of this is done. Adam especially leapt up, reclaiming the experimental daring of Edward and Hamlet.

At curtain call there was a disturbance in the audience. K had collapsed. Someone said he was having a seizure. Trinity’s mother called 911 and I ran out into the street to flag down the ambulance (and the ladder truck, as it turned out). When we cam back in, K was conscious, but profoundly confused, saying “What happened. . . Somebody help me. . . I’m afraid. . . I’m afraid.” Even familiar faces didn’t seem to comfort him. The guess was that the event had something to do with the waves of chemotherapy he’s been going through, but all will unfold in the next few hours. We’d had a Facebook exchange on how he was going in for more treatments this week, but how he wanted to come to the play anyway.

The producer in me– whom I sort of hate–ponders whether an event like that will be good or bad for business. Good, I think, coloring with shame.