The theatre itself was not a refashioned barn or circus tent set-up, but an actual theatre building, restored from previous incarnations as a movie and vaudeville house. I arrived on a lovely August morning but inside the theatre was in total darkness except for some lights on the stage. I made my way timidly down front where a number of people were sitting. Several nodded to me, and I nodded back. Presently a tall man got up on the stage and announced that he was going to direct the play. He said, however, that Miss Darnell had not yet arrived and, also, that there were not enough scripts to go around. We would begin with those who had their parts.
For the next three days, I sat in the darkness from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon. No one asked me to read, no one asked me to rehearse, practically no one talked to me at all. I managed a few words with Miss Darnell, who was gracious and charming, but I was beginning to wonder when I would be asked to act. Hope had been working with me on my lines, but it is one thing to know lines sitting down and quite another to remember them while trying to act and give them meaning before an audience.
I began to suspect that something was haywire. A friend who taught drama at a nearby college and often took character roles in stock confirmed my fears by assuring me that this play would never get off the ground. “It will never open,” he said.
We were to open on a Monday. It was already Friday and I had been on stage exactly once and nobody yet knew his part—I least of all. In addition to my fears, I was beginning to feel slighted. I wondered what I was doing in this dark, dank place, and what the rest thought they were doing, including the innumerable young men and women between sixteen and twenty years of age who were ostensibly developing their knowledge of the theatre through odd jobs such as wardrobe manager, program manager, etc. There didn’t seem much to manage and I wasn’t sure it was really a very healthy environment. By this time, a fair number of the cast had taken to screaming, which is something I am not used to among grown-ups for any extended period. I also had my doubts about a young man who spent most of his offstage moments sweet-talking a bulldog. I wondered if acting necessarily precluded any kind of emotional responsibility.
Saturday night the play preceding us closed. We rehearsed all that night. Sunday the theatre would be dark, and Monday The Royal Family was to go on. The Saturday night rehearsal was initially delayed because one of the principals could not be found. Finally he was located, dead drunk, in a local tavern. It was now almost one a.m. and not even a walk-through with script in hand had yet been attempted. Instead the company was engaged in a welter of screeching, shouting, confusion, and recriminations. This was sheer, silly nonsense I decided, and went to see the business manager. I told him I’d be pleased to quit and offered to pay double my salary to any experienced actor he could get to replace me. I was at once threatened with a lawsuit.
At two in the morning, everyone was called on stage by the director, who made a little speech saying that he was just no longer able to direct the play, he couldn’t pull it together! At this, Miss Darnell walked off the stage, saying, “This play will not open on Monday or Tuesday or ever, unless something is done immediately.” After all, she had a reputation to uphold.
Thereupon, the director returned with a further announcement. It so happened, he said, that a brilliantly gifted young New York director was “visiting here between important plays” and he had consented to pull the play together for us! Our gift of Providence then stepped forward and we began to rehearse.
When my cue came and I offered my lines, the new director said: “The Oscar Wolfe part is really just an afterthought. The show will play just as well without the Wolfe character appearing at all.”
“Fine,” I said, but pandemonium had already broken loose as the former director and some of the actors took issue with this new twist. We were already missing one actor and now this new director wanted to sack me. Well, I had asked for it, but Miss Darnell and the others persuaded me to stick with it. The rehearsal continued.
At five a.m. a halt was called and the treasurer of the theatre asked to say a few words. Under Equity rules, he reminded us, we were entitled to overtime for extra rehearsal. He asked us to waive this for the sake of the play. I waited silently to see what the general reaction would be. It didn’t take long to find out: Nothing doing, play or no play! I went along with them on that. What I couldn’t understand was why they put up with all they did: the filthy little cubicles that served as dressing rooms, the rats and cockroaches that scudded across the floor, the lack of any backstage source of drinking water—the whole atmosphere seemed deliberately designed to make an actor’s life completely insupportable. And now the management was sulking because the actors didn’t have enough “love for the theatre” to forgo their pay for overtime.