MEA CULPA: HOW I SCREWED UP TONIGHT'S SHOW
And the marvelous reception given to me afterwards

I'm feeling like a total blockhead right now.

I just got back from the preview performance of Arms and the Man and I have a strong urge to kick myself repeatedly. Really, it all seemed to work out okay, but this is the kind of thing that's hard for me to shake loose. In order to explain exactly what happened, you'll need to read the section of the script I wreaked havoc upon. This is from Act III; I play Petkoff:

PETKOFF. Excuse my shirtsleeves, gentlemen. Raina: somebody has been wearing that coat of mine: I'll swear it--somebody with bigger shoulders than mine. It's all burst open at the back. Your mother is mending it. I wish she'd make haste. I shall catch cold. (He looks more attentively at them.) Is anything the matter?

RAINA. No. (She sits down at the stove with a tranquil air.)

SERGIUS. Oh, no! (He sits down at the end of the table, as at
first.)

BLUNTSCHLI (who is already seated). Nothing, nothing.

PETKOFF (sitting down on the ottoman in his old place). That's
all right. (He notices Louka.) Anything the matter, Louka?

LOUKA. No, sir.

PETKOFF (genially). That's all right. (He sneezes.) Go and ask
your mistress for my coat, like a good girl, will you? (She
turns to obey; but Nicola enters with the coat; and she makes a
pretence of having business in the room by taking the little
table with the hookah away to the wall near the windows.)

RAINA (rising quickly, as she sees the coat on Nicola's arm).
Here it is, papa. Give it to me, Nicola; and do you put some
more wood on the fire. (She takes the coat, and brings it to the
Major, who stands up to put it on. Nicola attends to the fire.)

PETKOFF (to Raina, teasing her affectionately). Aha! Going to
be very good to poor old papa just for one day after his return
from the wars, eh?

RAINA (with solemn reproach). Ah, how can you say that to me,
father?

PETKOFF. Well, well, only a joke, little one. Come, give me a
kiss. (She kisses him.) Now give me the coat.

RAINA. Now, I am going to put it on for you. Turn your back. (He
turns his back and feels behind him with his arms for the
sleeves. She dexterously takes the photograph from the pocket
and throws it on the table before Bluntschli, who covers it with
a sheet of paper under the very nose of Sergius, who looks on
amazed, with his suspicions roused in the highest degree. She
then helps Petkoff on with his coat.) There, dear! Now are you
comfortable?

PETKOFF. Quite, little love. Thanks. (He sits down; and Raina
returns to her seat near the stove.)

Click here to read the entire play; really, it's quite good.

Anyway, that's how that scene is supposed to go. Here's what happened instead. After I ask Louka if anything is the matter I'm supposed to cross from stage left, sit down on stage right, and sneeze, ostensibly because I don't have my coat. Thing is, I make a similar cross two lines later after I've gotten up to allow Raina to put the coat on me. What happened tonight is that I jumped forward in my head and started my line as though I was already wearing the coat, completely forgetting that I needed to sneeze first. The problem was that I absolutely had to be wearing the coat in order for anything to make any sense at all. Not realizing that I had skipped forward two lines (the whole mess might have been avoided if I had just sat down and sneezed), I quickly tried to figure out why the hell I wasn't wearing my coat, and what the hell I was going to do to get us out of this mess I had somehow created--I figured that I had simply forgotten to wear it.

We were live, high in the air without a net, and I had to act quickly. So I simply improvised and said, "Just a moment," and ran offstage to grab my coat. I knew that doing this was going to flabbergast my fellow actors, but I had no idea how to get around it. I had to have the damned coat if we were going to move forward with the plot. On my way to the prop table I encountered the actor playing Nicola, my classmate Derek, standing there waiting to make his entrance with the coat just as he was supposed to do. I grabbed the coat from him and was back onstage only seconds after I had left, still not understanding what the hell was going on. The actress playing Raina, my classmate Anna, snatched the coat from me and stood there holding it open to put it on me, also just as she was supposed to do. Suddenly I knew the right thing to say: "Aha! Going to be very good to poor old papa just for one day after his return from the wars, eh?" And just like that we were back on track. Really, Anna completely saved the day. The audience seemingly never knew anything was amiss.

It was several minutes more before I figured out what had happened. My screw-up provided a curious benefit, or so says our director, of upping our energy level, and speeding up a scene that was apparently moving slowly. No surprise there. Of course everybody was charged by my bumbling: I almost cut the tightrope, almost made everybody fall to their metaphoric deaths. Nothing like a brush with death to enhance focus and urgency. I was freaked out myself, but I figure I had it coming for being such an idiot.

During the curtain call I mentally prepared myself for the round of apologies I knew I had to make. Then we were filing off, two by two, headed backstage. I had my tail between my legs. I was ready to hear "What the fuck just happened, man?" I was ready for some reasonable anger. Instead...

Instead, my classmates all congratulated me for my sense of grace under pressure. I tried to explain to them that it was my mess, and that I was really sorry for putting them all through it, but it was kind of difficult to get all that out. My buddies were too busy whooping it up. Reuben, who plays Bluntschli, was particularly congratulatory: "Ron, man, you are dope!!! You just up and left the stage!!!! I will remember that when I'm seventy five years old!!!"

It is very important to note how I've been struggling with a major lack of confidence in my acting since I've returned to university theater--the biggest question facing me has been "am I really an actor?" The fuck up I had tonight is precisely the kind of thing that would ordinarily send my ego crashing down into a dark black hole of self-doubt: the marvelous reception given me by my classmates once the show was over completely complicated that. I still feel like a complete idiot, but it's a much more comfortatable sense of idiocy than I was expecting to have. The point is that over the last year and a half of graduate school, we've grown into a real company of players. In other words, I've got a new home, which I didn't fully realize until earlier tonight. It goes without saying that home is where you can depend on others to bail you out when the chips are down. And that's exactly what my buddies did.


LSU's current MFA acting class: Kesha, Nikki, Derek, Anna, Me, Reuben, and Mark

Thanks guys, you'll never know how much tonight means to me.

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