We were trapped… No way out… And then the sarcophagus began to emit a deadly green light that knocked us out of our pith helmets… Yes, it was the terrifying climax of The Mummy’s Curse, Greensboro High’s one-act play in the Georgia High School Association literary meet, starring some of us football players as tomb-robbers. We failed to score, and that was the end of my acting career, except for the equally ill-fated production the next year of Submerged, when we were trapped inside a sunken sub, and…
Those entrapments inoculated me against the lure of the theater and allowed me to enjoy it from the audience, without getting involved, except as the number-one fan of my actor wife, Gay.
The director uses the tools of his trade.
Now, she has lured me behind the lights, and it is just as I feared: an awful lot of work, including manual labor in addition to all the memorization and trepidation over whether I can actually act. In spite of being so close to the theater all these years, I never could understand why a guy like, say, Allen Rowell, who is directing this play, would work all day at a real job then grab some supper and head for the theater for another two or three hours a night and much more on weekends for no pay, meanwhile learning lines every waking moment. If you saw Allen as the composer Salieri in the recent, brilliant Town & Gown Players production of Amadeus that Terrell Austin directed, you get an inkling of just what mental work a play can entail. He was on stage the whole play, delivering non-stop monologues. But that’s just when he’s acting. When he’s directing (and even when he’s not) he’s also building the set—I mean converting a bare stage into three or four rooms of a house, engineering it all to support the action of the play and then building it out of lumber and plywood. And his crew by and large are the same people who are also learning their lines so that they can portray the characters in the play (unless they’re local artist Larry Forte, who’s not even in the play but shows up to lend his carpentry tools and skills). And of course all these people have their own jobs and families and classes to juggle day and night. Maybe it’s the same impulse, whether building a character or a set—to mess around with reality, to reshape it the way you want it to be, perhaps to leave a lasting effect on somebody. Allen says it has to do with creating something, and he says that’s why actors want to direct, so you can create the whole thing, instead of just one role.
Anyway, this particular play is the Pulitzer Prize winner, August: Osage County. Allen’s direction is as strong as his set-building, and there are a lot of good actors with great lines to sling. It’s about a large, complicated family with a lot of secrets, and it will make you laugh and cringe. It opens Friday, April 12 at the Athens Community Theatre behind the Taylor-Grady House and runs that weekend and the next. I’ve got a plum of a part, but it’s brief, and even if I mess it up, just remember that I put down the base coat on a lot of that set.
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