My Fair Lazy - Jen Lancaster [47]
Our seats are hopelessly close together. We wedge into our slots and I tell Stacey, “This makes me long for a middle seat on an airplane. In coach.”
“Yeah, it’s tight,” she agrees. “But the shows here are always worth the squeeze.”
“Just so you know, I’m putting my arm around you unless you want to fight me for the armrest for the next ninety minutes.”
The seating area is divided into three sections of risers, forming a U around the stage. We’re in the section on the far right, but that doesn’t matter—there’s not a bad seat in the joint. And even the back row is within twenty feet of the stage. Although there isn’t a stage, per se. There’s just a clearing filled with various pieces of a set. One portion looks like an Army barracks, another is a bar, and the third contains a couple of fancy armchairs. The whole performance area is barely bigger than my old living room.
Between the cramped seats and simplicity of the stage, I’ve already decided that I prefer elaborate productions and I mentally cross Writers’ Theatre off my list of places to return. This is too small. I can hear the dude next to me breathing and I can smell vanilla. I suspect someone here had cupcakes right before they arrived.96
This is too intimate. I don’t want to be this close to the audience or the actors. What if I sneeze over someone’s line? What if my stomach growls in anticipation of my pending grilled cheese? The old guy to my right has a whistling nostril—what if this eventually causes one of the actors to snap?97 I don’t want to hear the cadence of someone else’s breath or feel their pulse through a shared armrest. It’s creepy.
And this set? Ugh. It’s so plain. Look at all the unused space above the stage. You could totally suspend big rocks or maybe part of a farmhouse over this thing. And why do all three settings have to be onstage at the same time? They can’t carry the wing chairs in and out between breaks? I can’t fathom what Stacey meant when she said this show will be “huge.” This whole setting is too small to be “big.”
I shift uncomfortably in my tiny chair and wait for the damned thing to begin.
“What’d you think?” Stacey asks me as we walk up the mansion’s stairs to the cast party.
I need a minute to formulate my response. I’m not even sure how to begin. But I get what Stacey meant by “big” now. The story involved an accidental shooting on an Army base in Fallujah. Friendly fire. I’ve heard a million stories about what it’s like to be deployed—the pride of service tempered with boredom and laced with loneliness and punctuated with brief flashes of terror. Without once foisting an agenda on me, the playwright nailed all this. When I watched things go terribly wrong, I kept thinking, “That could have been my husband. That could have been my friend. That could have happened.”
I finally reply, “This play is going to stick with me for a long, long time.”
The unexpected end result of being in such close quarters is that the drama is amplified ten thousand times. When the woman in front of me sucked in her breath at a plot twist, I heard it. When my neighbor’s pulse quickened in response to a tense moment, I felt it. And being ten feet away from the actors made me feel less like I was an audience member and more like an accidental participant. It was awkward and off-putting and . . . exhilarating. “Who knew a story could be so powerful with such a modest set and so little space?”
Stacey nods a tad smugly. “That’s Writers’ Theatre.”
“When I compare this in my mind to what we saw at the Goodman, well, there is no comparison. This play blew the other away on what, maybe five percent of the budget?”
Once we hit the party, I get a glass of wine and Stacey has a ginger ale. We grab a table close to the bar but I’m having trouble saying anything. The drama