Goodbye to "Thebes"

The Burial at Thebes had its final performance last night. Definitely one of my top theater experiences. It was my first tragedy, and in modern language, in a very intimate space, so I had to learn more "normal" reactions than you would use in a larger space, such as where I just did La Belle Helene. Last night during my long backstage break, I finally counted up my lines - 32 in the whole show, including the unison lines in the choral odes. I spent a lot of time on stage in this show, but with so few lines, I obviously was spending most of that stage time reacting to what others were saying and doing. All that time I've spent doing just that in ensembles was good preparation! ;-)

But nothing prepared me for crying real tears on stage. I've done a fair bit of mock crying, but this was different. I always ended up crying at least a little during the Haemon-Creon scene but last night was the soggiest. At one point Haemon came up to me during one of his speeches (I spent nearly all my stage time at the back of the set on one of the platforms), which he'd never done before, and we held hands briefly. As he turned to go back to his increasingly heated exchange with Creon, I squeezed his hand, then raised one hand toward his cheek. That little exchange "primed the pump", as it were, choking me up. The tears came more readily then, as Haemon & Creon got more & more upset, to the point where I had to make a conscious effort not to cry audibly. By the time I exited on Creon's heels, the tears were running so freely that I had to check a mirror in the dressing room to see whether my eye make-up was running. (It wasn't. Maybelline Ultra-Liner - good stuff!)

I liked the way our director broke up the chorus bits, assigning most of the lines to individuals and designating other lines to be spoken by smaller groups or all of us, instead of the more traditional method of having everyone in the chorus say every chorus line. Having a choreographer block the choral odes was another choice that I hadn't expected but which I liked. It certainly set the odes apart from the rest of the action and made sure that they didn't stop the action dead in its tracks.

This was a good stretch - I got to work with a director whose process was very different from anything I'd encountered before, I got another straight play under my belt, I learned how to cry on stage, and I got to do a show I'm proud to say I was part of.