Equivocation, Part 3 (The One With The Toasts)

Equivocation closed on Sunday and I failed to write anything about it.  I had planned this “funny” post where I talked about how I had gotten my track down to a science, and detailed how I spent a lot time sitting in the green room or on the floor backstage, and jumped up at the precise moments to be where I needed to be…but the day that I started writing it was the day EVERYTHING went wrong.  One of the actors got a scary phone call 5 minutes before curtain and thought his child was sick or hurt, so the first 15 minutes was real hectic until he could get offstage, get someone on the phone, and make sure everything was fine.  Props were misplaced (not always by me) and right before the end of Act I, one of the actors spilled a tidal wave of fake blood (mostly corn syrup and red food dye) all over herself and backstage left.  While we made it through intermission and got her cleaned up, some of the spots on the floor backstage were missed by the mop, and so I spent a lot of the second act finding sticky blood spots and trying to clean it with baby wipes.

ANYWAY, Equivocation is closed now and that’s that.  It was a good closing.  The audience was very friendly and agreeable and on our sides.  The cast got to go back out for a second bow.  (The stage manager apparently LOVES encore bows and always wanted to send them back out, but this was actually deserved.)  The champagne toast onstage was very nice and everyone was happy and it was just a good note to go out on.  One of the actors tipped me (hooray!) and one of them gave me a copy of Middlemarch, because he had been telling me to read it ever since rehearsal.  That may very well be the nicest closing present I’ve ever gotten.  The tipping actor told me that the book actor must really respect me, because that is one of the highest compliments he pays (she’s known him for about 15 years).

I was sad for about 10 minutes and then I started in on the next project, which is 5 days of a reading of this new play called Carthage by Emily Schwend.  I really like the play and I’m stage managing and it fills in this week, which otherwise I would have had off.  On Friday we start prep for the next mainstage show and on Tuesday we start rehearsals and then I’ll just have hundreds of things to say about Woody Guthrie’s American Song.