The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Young actors’ motto: Be prepared
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
When it comes to planning, I suppose Ike ought to know a thing or two about it. After all, this is the guy who as Supreme Allied Commander during Operation Overlord — D-Day — in 1944 had two speeches prepared. One was a speech he would give if the long-awaited, critical D-Day invasion was a success.
The other speech was one he would craft if the landing was a failure.
I’m sure that was a fun speech to write. Fortunately for the world, the gallant efforts of the Allies guaranteed we only had to hear him deliver the former.
As I stood over Ike’s grave in Abilene, Kansas, on the way home from one of our Couch Family Treks, I’m not sure that I knew that story about him. If I had, I might have realized that Ike and I had something in common.
We both liked to be prepared.
Part of that came from my Boy Scout days in Mentor’s Troop 280. That’s the Scout motto, of course. But part of that comes from my experience on stage as a thespian as well.
Every actor can tell you of a mortifying moment on stage when something did not go according to plan, and they had to improvise on the spot. It even has a name — “The Actor’s Nightmare.” We’ve all had it, and lived it.
I certainly had one during “Annie Get Your Gun” at Rabbit Run Theatre in 1994 when my “skeet shooting” contest with Annie Oakley went horribly awry thanks to some poorly timed offstage sound effects to go along with my on-stage prop gun. Oh, the humanity.
Then there was the performance of “Anything Goes” at the same barn in 1992 when the only other character who was supposed to come on stage to talk with me never appeared because she was having a carefree moment casually changing in the dressing room. I seriously considered having a conversation with a prop seagull.
Ah, well. Some improvisations go better than others.
But perhaps my greatest on-stage high-wire act came in 1993. (What’s with the early ’90s? I’m getting old.) I was doing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at Lake Erie College with a blond hairdo that was designed to make me look all-American but instead just made me kind of a deranged red-head — not like that impacted my first teaching assignment that year or anything.
That show is a challenging piece with only four actors — two couples at a collegiate professor’s home for a night of verbal arguments. At one point, the other gentleman and I were left on stage for about five pages of dialogue. He sat down next to me on the sofa with a kind of perplexed look and said, “Well, what shall we talk about?”
That was not the line! I played him off, knowing he was momentarily lost. “I don’t know. You tell me.” Or something like that. (Brilliant.)
He recovered quickly with one of his lines, three pages early! I could only envision what the two women were thinking backstage, knowing we had just skipped a significant exchange that would cause the rest of the show to make no sense if we
didn’t get it in.
Ah, but too late. We continued the conversation he started, all the while wondering individually how to go back and pick up the rest. But my partner, at the end of the first conversation, guided us right back there at the end of the first exchange. The ladies returned before we ran out of dialogue, and the audience was never the wiser.
But all four actors were ready for a post-show nightcap after that one!
Bottom line, young thespians, be prepared.
If we had not known our lines so well, we could not have navigated that moment successfully. Many actors claim they don’t need to nail their dialogue because they arrogantly say they like to improvise or “be in the moment.” But to do so without knowing your lines is to try to pull a high-wire act without a net. Or a wire. Just like a military operation, in theater you have to go with the flow when events on the ground do not go according to the script. But if you
don’t have a script, you’re looking at mission failure.
Remember, Eisenhower knew what he was talking about after having to write his own monologue: “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
I like Ike.
Have a show you’d like to see profiled in Young Thespians this fall? Message Steve Couch @ StevenRCouch on Twitter, via e-mail at stevecouch@windstream.net, or post in our Young Thespians Facebook group.