22 November 2021

Lights! Action! Murder...


 by Steve Liskow

A week ago, I did something I haven't done since 2004.


Proof, that last audition, 2005

I auditioned for a play at a local community theater. From the early 1980s until 2009, I acted, directed, produced or designed for over 100 productions in central Connecticut, but I pretty much left theater in 2010. It was a combination of burnout and signing my first contract for a novel, and it seemed like time to turn from stage to page. Since then, I've acted in one show where the director invited me to take the role, and directed a couple of one-act plays where friends I'd worked with before asked me to step in.  
Me as the cop in Miller's "The Price," my last role in 2013



I seldom read plays anymore. At my age, I don't see a lot of interesting roles I could do, anyway. But this particular play needed a sixty-five-year-old male who is a former literature professor, and it's a substantial role, the only male with four women. 

When I arrived at the theater, I met four other men; I'd worked with three of them before--often--and knew the fourth. All of us were over 60. Coincidence?

I didn't get cast, but Barbara, my wife, will play the matriarch lead. She still performs in three or four productions a year. In fact, she closed in a production Saturday night, and her first read-thru for this new show will be tonight.

I don't mind not getting cast (I can stay home watching the UConn Women basketball games), but it started me thinking about my overlapping interests/careers.

One novel and fifteen of my short stories use music as an important component of the story. Two of my novels involve teachers, my day job for three decades. I've only used theater in one story, and it didn't involve the actual play at all. Upon further reflection, I couldn't remember a single story involving theater by ANYBODY that strikes me as better than mediocre. I haven't read everything out there, of course, and Linda Barnes, a former teacher and actor herself (and also from Michigan), used an actor/amateur sleuth for several novels before creating Carlotta Carlyle. She left the actor behind because she decided his propensity for showing up where people died might affect his chances of getting cast again. 


I've never read any of Barnes's theater stories, but most of the others--and I can't think of many--betray the writer's lack of knowledge or experience in theater. The performance spaces, characters, and technical aspects of the show all sound like they're out of the 1950s, and the actors and other theater people are little more than comedic stereotypes. The last light board with those immense levers like Frankenstein's laboratory disappeared by 1990. For the last show I directed at Hole in the Wall in 2008, my lighting designer sat in the auditorium and programmed 104 light cues involving about 70 instruments on her laptop. For all I know, today she might use an app on her phone. 

The lessons I learned in theater carry over to writing, though. Both my acting and directing mentors quoted Sanford Meisner's dictum about monologues: nobody has to watch the person speaking a monologue unless the actor MAKES him pay attention. That doesn't mean over-the-top histrionics (which are hard to do on paper). It means being real and showing what is at stake. High stakes is what story-telling is all about. 

And that got me thinking again, always a dangerous thing. I haven't written a new story in a few weeks because I've been trolling for ideas.

Maybe it's time to go back to that other part of my life and try a mystery based on theater.

(...Fade to Black...)

7 comments:

  1. Steve, I too have played the actor and strutted before a king - back in the 70s, I was part of an Atlanta troupe called Lit Cave Theater. Lot of fun. We even got good reviews.
    If you haven't seen it yet, Slings & Arrows is a fantastic miniseries (Canadian) about a Shakespearean festival troupe.
    Stories re theater - I thought Ngaio Marsh's "Death at the Dolphin" was pretty good, but I haven't read it in years.

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  2. Eve, my mother liked Ngaio Marsh, but I don't remember reading any of her work. I'll have to check that out along with the early Barnes stories. Thanks for the heads-up.

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  3. That's interesting. Anywhere you can get a idea for story is good.

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  4. Agatha Christie wrote a novel, it might have been Three Act Tragedy, but don't quote me, I haven't read her work in years and years ... in which there were two murders committed close together by the same perp & the clue was that the first murder was only a dress rehearsal. The second victim was the one the perp actually wanted to do away with.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks, Elizabeth. Something else I can check out...

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  5. Congrats on trying out (so many people who want to don't!) and congrats to Barbara! Having spent a little time on stage I applaud both of you! As for writing more short-stories, I have to write more myself! And for doing theater stories, I will say "May Ngaio Marsh and Fritz Leiber guide your pen!"

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  6. Several of Ngaio Marsh's novels were set in the theater world of her era; she had a career as a director. And P.M. Carlson's protagonist Maggie Ryan's husband Nick O'Connor is an actor, with some of the 8 novels set in the theater world.

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