Short Crutch, Long Intermission,
and God Bless a Good Stage Manager

Chris O'Carroll

“Remember that time you split the seat of your pants in the middle of a scene?”

“Remember the briefcase full of cash that refused to pop open at the crucial moment in that British crime comedy? The gun that didn’t go off in Hedda Gabler? The bat that wouldn’t fly in Dracula? The props that failed to leap off the mantel in Blithe Spirit? The time you turned the wrong way in the dark and fell off the stage?”

Such are the nostalgic musings with which theatre folk greet each other when we run into old comrades at some of the big annual audition events. Every actor carries around a little stock of backstage anecdotes, funny or horrifying vignettes suitable for sharing with Jay Leno or David Letterman should the fame and fortune scenario unfold according to plan. For example, those of us who were involved in that production of A Christmas Carol will always have a special bond because we’ll always have the tale of Tiny Tim’s finger.

Christmas was less than a week away; we were near the end of the run. In fact, we were near the end of the entire season. The first rehearsals had started back in May, back when snowflakes and sleighbells seemed quaint, distant, almost mythological. This staging of the Dickens classic was our seventh and final production of the year. As the holiday ghost story does for so many theatres (and as Nutcracker does for so many dance companies), it was drawing good crowds and giving our box office a much needed lift. Busloads of schoolkids were jamming the house for our weekday morning performances, and somebody was filling an awful lot of seats at the evening and weekend shows - maybe the friends and relatives of all the local children who were playing Cratchit offspring and miscellaneous urchins.

We were grabbing the opportunity for a holiday-season crescendo of fundraising to shore up the theatre’s always precarious finances. We didn’t try to shake down the school groups, but at all the other shows, we were sending costumed child actors into the crowd at intermission to sell raffle tickets. Then we’d hold a drawing and hand out prizes before dimming the lights for Act II. The ledger was filling with black ink, the audiences and the company were reveling in mutual good cheer, and with just a couple more performances to go, we were ready to conclude the season on a high note. Then fate’s finger decided to flip us some special excitement.

When the crisis started, I knew less about it than any other member of the cast. I was playing Scrooge, who is onstage virtually every moment the curtain is up. Whatever heartaches and thousand natural shocks the Cratchits, the Ghosts, and the rest of my friends and co-workers might be suffering behind the scenes, I remained happily unaware. They were all pros who didn’t carry the backstage trauma with them when they came on to play their scenes.

We sailed through the opening sequence at the office. Scrooge abuses Bob Cratchit. He snarls at his nephew’s Christmas greeting. He refuses to contribute to a holiday fund for the poor. He throws the charity workers out. He chases the carolers away from his window. The scene shifts to Scrooge’s home. Marley’s Ghost rattles his chains and roars his warnings from beyond the grave. The Ghost of Christmas Past makes her gymnastic entrance from an upper level of the set. As far as I can tell up to this point, all is well.

Backstage, however, the situation is Code Bright Red. The young actor playing Tiny Tim has thrust his finger through a hole in some metal rail. Now he can’t pull the digit out again, it’s swelling painfully, and he has an entrance coming up. I should clarify that. Tiny Tim doesn’t appear until Act II, when the Ghost of Christmas Present gives Scrooge a look at Bob Cratchit’s home life, but most of the children in the cast are playing multiple roles in this production. Before donning his Tim costume and picking up his crutch, this boy is scheduled to appear in several Act I scenes as other characters. It looks as though none of those characters will be gracing our stage this evening. The metal is only about an eighth of an inch thick, but it won’t let go. The finger is in there tight. The actor is a tough, dedicated kid and he’s being as quietly stoic as he can, but if he pulls any harder, he’s going to start stripping skin and screaming like a steam engine.

The director of the show is also a cast member, so in between supervising the rescue efforts backstage, he’s got his scenes to play. He’ll check on the lubricants that people are applying in an effort to help Tim slide his finger free, then he’ll switch into actor mode and step out onto the set to deliver a few lines in a British accent. As soon as his sojourn in Victorian London is done, he’ll be seizing the backstage headphones to confer in an American-accented whisper with the stage manager in her booth high above the back of the hall. This stage manager is so unflappable it’s a superpower. She’s already got a complicated menu of lighting effects and other technical details to keep track of in this show; now she gets word that one of the marquee characters may be down for the count and the director needs an ambulance and a rescue squad in the alley behind the theatre pronto. Without missing a single light or sound cue, without a moment’s disruption to the flow of the show, she phones 911, looks up the young actor’s personal data, and puts through the necessary calls to parents and grandparents who may have to give consent for medical attention. Soon the director is swinging wide the door to the backstage loading dock and welcoming a crew of firefighters and paramedics to the party.

Scrooge, meanwhile, is cheerfully clueless, his ignorance fitting as snugly as his granny glasses and yard-long nightcap. My first inkling that something might be awry comes in the Fezziwig party scene, when I notice that we’re short one pair of dancers. Each pair dances a short solo in this scene, and it’s all precisely timed to some taped music, so with one pair missing, there’s potential for chaos and panic. Fortunately, the director is right there on stage to take care of the problem. When the music strikes up, every other pair dances its solo routine as usual. But he and his partner go through their steps twice, neatly covering for the absence of the young dancer who’s still painfully detained backstage.

A few minutes later, the boy isn’t there for another scene. The other cast members adjust for his absence with great aplomb, and I’m sure nobody in the audience knows that anything out of the ordinary is happening, but I’m starting to worry. Our Tiny Tim is an extremely reliable kid, so if he has missed two scenes, he must be sick or hurt. Still, the director hasn’t stopped the show, so whatever’s going on backstage must be under control for the time being. I do my best to stay focused and carry the act through to a strong finish.

Blackout. Applause. Exit in the dark. The lights in the hall come up and the sound of many hands clapping gives way to the buzz of intermission chitchat. All of the usual costumed children set forth on their raffle ticket sales missions. All but one. In a corner by the back door, his stuck finger engorged and purple, Tiny Tim is waiting as patiently as he can for the adults who swarm around him to get something helpful accomplished. His face is strained, but he greets well-wishers with an occasional wan smile. The rescue squad has determined that the metal rail in which he’s stuck fast has no load-bearing function. They can cut away a chunk of it without doing a Samson-in-the-temple number on the actors and audience gathered under our roof. Their plan is to cut off maybe six to 12 inches of metal, then take the boy to the hospital with that much still attached to his hand. They’ll leave it to the emergency room staff to do the finer cutting involved in actually freeing the finger. I start imagining worst-case scenarios involving amputation - A Christmas Carol meets Titus Andronicus.

Once we’re confident that Tim is being tended to, we have time to worry about what this means for Act II. Intermission is stretching far beyond its normal length already, and we have to tell the audience something. We decide we’ll go ahead with the raffle as usual. Then we’ll apologize to the audience for the delay and explain, without too many grisly specifics, that our Tiny Tim has suffered a minor mishap and an understudy is stepping into the role. We recruit an instant understudy from among the other boys in the cast.

“I don’t know Tiny Tim’s lines,” the lad protests.
“There’s only one line that matters,” we remind him. “You know that one, right?”
“God bless us every one!” he says.
“You’re gonna be a star,” we tell him.

He’s about a foot taller than the boy he’s replacing. He has to scrunch himself down comically to lean on Tim’s crutch. He and I and the actor playing Bob Cratchit stand eyeing each other in a forlorn cluster. Bob and I are not exactly strapping six-footers. A couple of versatile, medium-height character actors, that’s us. Not tall, hunky, dime-a-dozen leading-man types limited by our generic mannequin good looks. This new Tim stands shoulder-high to both of us. There’s no question of him riding on Bob’s back or leaping into my arms for the final tableau. “Just run up and give me a hug, and then I’ll stand with a hand on your shoulder,” I propose.
He grimaces. “Do I have to hug you?”
Just what I need at this stage of the game, a dose of adolescent gender anxiety. “It’s a dirty job, kiddo, but somebody’s gotta do it.”

Giving the rescue squad plenty of time to do its metal cutting work and load Tim into the ambulance, the director makes an elaborate production out of drawing the winning numbers and awarding the raffle prizes. Local businesses donate prize items in exchange for free publicity, and they are getting a supersized helping of it in his spiel tonight. When the last happy winner has collected the last trophy, he breaks the news about Tiny Tim and explains the show-must-go-on steps that we’re taking.

When Act II has begun, and a Tim who’s not much tinier than his father makes his first entrance, trying to lean on that too-short crutch, there’s a certain amount of guilty, inappropriate laughter from the audience. Some of us onstage have to concentrate to keep from cracking up ourselves. On the whole, though, the second half of the play goes well. The robust Ghost of Christmas Present and the spooky Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come make their usual potent impressions. Tim’s pinch hitter keeps his wits about him and does a solid job with his dual responsibility - all the roles he ordinarily plays, plus all of Tim’s scenes. The audience goes home full of holiday merriment, and as we’re changing out of our costumes, Tiny Tim comes bouncing into the dressing room, back from the hospital with his good cheer restored, with his finger in full working order, and with a souvenir to show off. He’s got two pieces of metal that the hospital cut off his finger. Each piece is notched with part of a circle. He fits them together, reconstituting the hole that trapped him. He stows both pieces in his pocket. I hope he’ll be digging them out for his grandchildren one day, and telling the story that goes with them.

A lot of the theatre stories with which I bore and tyrannize younger friends and relations come from doing summer stock in another century under a canvas tent that made every show hostage to the elements. When it rained outside, the downpour drummed so loudly on that tent that nobody could hear the actors. Shouting our lines on stage, we could barely hear each other. When things got that bad, we’d stop the play and put on a juggler or some such while we waited for the storm to abate. One week, we had to keep calling rain delays during a production of The Rainmaker. Is irony allowed to get that thick and predictable? Water would be flailing the canvas overhead, we’d be skidding on puddles in the aisles as we made our entrances and exits, and our dialogue was full of lamentations about how dry it was and how we hadn’t seen a drop of rain since Lord knows when. Normally, audience laughter is a sound that actors love to hear, but we were none too happy with some of the chortles that greeted that show.

Making a fool of yourself in front of others is an essential feature of an actor’s job description. Sometimes the script demands it, sometimes our own shortcomings make it inevitable. Some of us are born fools, some achieve foolishness, some have foolishness thrust upon us by theatre deities with a puckish sense of humor. Then our friends and colleagues get to tell funny stories about us.

I recall, and I’m sure my fellow cast members recall with greater relish, the night I was just about to make an entrance when the assistant stage manager whispered in my ear that she was having an equipment problem and there would be no explosion sound effect in this scene. The actors who are out there already don’t know, she tells me. They’re expecting to hear the explosion, so I’ll have to cover. This is kind of a big deal. The explosion is a thunderous, rafter-rattling sound effect, a cue for all of us onstage to throw ourselves to the floor. Then we’re supposed to get up, dust ourselves off, and talk about the blast we’ve just heard. So if there ain’t gonna be no blast, I’ve got about a minute and a half to figure out how we can make up the rest of the scene as we go along. I make my entrance. Another actor delivers the line that’s supposed to cue the explosion. Everybody else prepares to be knocked off their feet. But I know the explosion isn’t going to happen. In a gallant bid to keep the show from grinding to a standstill, I ad lib the line, “We have already heard the palace blow up.”

Then the explosion happens. As I hurl myself to the floor along with everybody else, I’m trying to spot the silver lining in this humiliating situation. It sounds like the backstage crew must have fixed the sound equipment. Which is good news, but what the hell am I going to say as we stand up and start to brush ourselves clean. I have just baffled my fellow actors with a line that’s not in the script. I’ve announced, “We have already heard the palace blow up,” and sure enough, we have heard the palace blow up. Some of my friends in the cast are looking at me curiously. Am I going to be making up lines about all the light and sound cues from now on? “We have already heard some music.” “The lights have already gone out.” Do I have anything else to say at the moment? Anything that might put the scene back on track now that I’ve managed to derail us? With characteristic suavity, my mind swiftly formulates the perfect line to extricate us from this sticky moment. As I whisk the dusk from the knees of my trousers, I declare with unruffled confidence, “And we have just heard the palace blow up again.”

Really. That’s the best I can come up with. “We have heard the palace blow up again.” I don’t even have the presence of mind to add something cryptic like, “In this war, we hear the palace blow up many times.” Eventually, we navigate the disrupted scene to its end. Once all the actors have left the stage, the assistant stage manager fills them in on what happened. They are glad to stop worrying about my mental health and concentrate on the happier task of making fun of me.

Stories like these have been on my mind lately because I’ve been getting ready for a couple of those annual auditions I mentioned. This is the time of year when summer theatres and other companies are casting for the season ahead. Which means, this is the time when producers, directors, and job-seeking actors converge on the Unified Professional Theatre Auditions in Memphis, the New England Theatre Conference Auditions in Boston, The MidWest Theatre Auditions in St. Louis, and similar events in other regions of the country. I expect I’ll be running into lots of friends with whom I share custody of my war stories. Our main focus will be on impressing prospective employers. But there is a time to every purpose under heaven, and we will also find the right nightspots to drink and reminisce.

Theatre company representatives come to these yearly auditions armed with lists of the shows they’re casting. They’re checking out actors by age and type, and they know in 10 or 15 seconds whether they want to see more of a particular auditioner. Actors come armed with 90 seconds of material. Some do a short monologue from a play and a few bars of a song. Those of us who don’t sing often choose to do two contrasting monologues - one Shakespearean and one contemporary, or one comic and one dramatic, anything to show off a bit of our range. We present these prepared audition pieces to an auditorium full of people who are scribbling on clipboards and shuffling stacks of photos and résumés. By the time they catch our 90-seconds of histrionic brilliance, maybe they’ve been scribbling and shuffling for a couple of hours. Maybe for a couple of days. We know that a lot of directors are also actors, and we cross our fingers that they will have the insight and fellow feeling to see how much we have to offer.

Every hour or so, each company posts its callback list. Actors loiter near the bulletin boards, waiting to see their names posted. When we get our callbacks, we sign up for private audition or interview time slots with each company that wants to see us. At a callback, we meet some of the people we’ll be working with if we join the company. Maybe they ask if we have any more audition pieces prepared, beyond what they saw at the 90-second cattle call. Maybe they have us read scenes from some of the plays they’ll be staging this season. Maybe they try us out with some improv exercises, or interview us about past work experience, ask us about teachers or directors who can provide references.

The cattle call part of the audition fills up the morning and afternoon, so the callbacks often run pretty late into the evening. But the auditions are usually headquartered at some convention hotel where the bar stays open late, so there’s plenty of time after the anxieties of the day to unwind with friends and relive the anxieties of earlier days. Did I mention the time my pants split? We were right in the middle of this high-energy, breakneck-pace farce. . . .

Chris O'Carroll