With the Mayfly Playhouse, the show must always go on
This is a column by Glenn Cheney, who lives in Hanover, N.H., but was a longtime New London resident. He has often attended Mayfly Playhouse and this year will be a volunteer. He is managing editor of New London Librarium and the author or translator of more then 40 books.
Among the many weird things that happen in New London, the annual Mayfly plays rank among the most stellar. On a Friday evening in the dead of winter, six playwrights are handed assignments. Each has to write a play and hand it in by morning. They have 12 hours to crank out the impossible. No cheating!
The Mayfly Playhouse will take place again this year smack-dab in the middle of the winter — 8 p.m. Saturday.
The assignments include certain props, themes, and lines that must be included. The plays must be written for a certain number of characters. Until that Friday evening, only the producer knows these details.
The next morning, six troupes are handed the plays. They have but 12 hours to prepare. Dress rehearsals start at 5 that afternoon. The performances start at 8.
What could possible go wrong? Well, plenty.
Trouble is, the show must go on. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom nor a fire upstairs shall stay these thespians from their hour upon the stage.
That’s what happened last
year — a fire upstairs. And that was just the last of several things that went wrong. The impossible really was impossible. But they did it anyway.
At the center of the 24 hours of rolling catastrophe was producer Kato McNickle. Kato’s credentials defy credence. She writes plays, directs plays, produces plays, edits plays and plays in plays.
Under pressure, she’s cool as a cuke. She prepares with the acumen of a CEO, and she leads with military discipline. She’s an optimist who knows that everything’s going to go wrong, so she prepares like a pessimist in a foxhole.
She has six rehearsal areas ready, plus a couple of backups just in case. She has an extra writer in case one of the others gets sick or something. She has a few extra actors ready to go. She has extra props. She has garbage bags for the rehearsal trash. She has extra garbage bags. She has solutions all set before the problems even think about popping up.
When the Friday evening in the dead of winter comes around, she’s ready. She becomes a clock with an iron fist in a padded oven mitt.
Forty-eight people know what to do and where to be at any given moment in the next 24 hours. No exceptions. No excuses. She tells them what must be done, but she’s nice about it. Gentle. She wants Mayfly to happen, but nobody gets hurt.
Last year, for the 12th annual Mayfly, a certain writer came in from New York to write one of the plays. She was prone to social anxiety, so the last thing she needed was a laptop that wouldn’t boot. But that’s what she had, and the only solution was back in New York. A show can’t go on if it doesn’t get written, so Kato dispatched a techie. But the case was beyond first aid, so Kato came up with a laptop, and the writer got to work.
Next morning, the writers emailed their plays to Kato. Five were on time, but for some reason, one of them caused Kato’s computer to crash. It crashed and crashed and crashed.
The actors were waiting, sweating in the dead of winter. They were going to be on stage in 12 hours. It was down to 11 hours before a convoluted internet process got the file open and the play printed.
The sixth writer finished his play, shot it off by email, turned off his phone and, exhausted from his all-nighter, hit the hay. He’d forgotten that he’d turned off his wifi so nobody could bother him. The email sat idling in his outbox while his eager actors stewed. His phone off, he couldn’t be roused.
Somebody had to go find his hotel room and pound on his door until he woke up. It took a while. He was tired.
By 5, everyone convened for dress rehearsal at the ballroom of the Crocker House, where Eugene O’Neill himself once wet his whistle. The doors were to open in two hours. Five o’clock was also the hour that water started dripping from the ceiling. Then it started gushing. Then the ceiling started falling in. Then the fire trucks arrived. The Crocker was on fire.
The troupes withdrew and regrouped at the Hygienic Gallery, the organizer of the event. Kato was cool. She knew something like this was going to happen.
She quickly calculated three options: They could say to hell with it and go have dinner. They could go find some little space somewhere and put on the performance just for themselves. Or by hook or crook they could present the plays to the public.
Things don’t happen when people say to hell with it, and a show isn’t really going on if it’s in somebody’s garage. The show must go on … but where? It was almost 6. Halfway between the Crocker and the Hygienic, conveniently across the street from the Dutch Tavern, was a wide-open space the Democratic Party was using as headquarters. Because this was in New London and not some normal town, it took just one phone call to get permission and a key.
The doors opened to the public by 8, and the show went on.
According to plan, this year’s Mayfly will happen at the Crocker House. It will be the 13th performance. What could possibly go wrong? Kato knows, and she’s ready.