Allison Page, providing useful information for those in need.
Follow these quick and easy steps and do away with all those pesky offers coming at you left and right!
1. Pick a fight with the stage manager! Maybe it’s about how she asked you to put away your costumes because she’s a dictator. Tell her it’s not part of your art to put your stuff away! You didn’t take that one class in college to spend your life hanging up a vintage velvet suit! That’ll show ‘er, and will ensure that you’ll not get stuck working on a show with her any time soon.
2. Demand 154 comps for a one week run. After all, you’ve got family in town, and you are the star. And sure, maybe 153 of them won’t show up, but you’ve got to hold those seats just in case. It’s your right as Titania queen of the fairies, in this all male production of Midsummer, to take up as much space with your aunts and nephews as you so choose.
3. Request repeatedly to be listed in the program as “Actor and Costumer” because you wore your own socks.
4. Give line readings to your fellow actors after each rehearsal. They’ll thank you later. Your knowledge is so vast it would be a crime not to help them, and they definitely won’t tell everyone they ever work with that you did that and that they hated it and you.
5. Tell the choreographer that you “Took a one day tap workshop with Greg, ever heard of him? Yeah he was on TV. So I can really just like fix whatever you’re thinking here. But sure, if you wanna take a pass at it, whatever.”
6. Don’t memorize your lines. It’s fine. Just get the gist of it. Same thing. You consider yourself a writer anyway. It won’t change the story at all if you suddenly shout that a bear is entering the scene. It’ll probably make it better, honestly. Art is collaboration and you’ve got things to add. To every scene. Everybody loves you once they really get it. They’ll learn someday, the poor idiots.
7. Show up whenever you feel artistically inspired to be at rehearsal. What difference does it make if you’re on time but don’t feel moved by the spirit of theater?
8. Ask to leave whenever you feel like there might be something else you could do, like a party or a beer festival. Sure, you knew about this rehearsal 3 months ago but like…life is unpredictable.
9. Answer your phone during notes each night and then put one finger in the air like “Just a minute” and go outside, where you stay for 20 minutes.
10. Tell everyone the show is shit after the first rehearsal: other cast members, friends, family, potential audience members, subscribers, the internet.
11. Start a lot of sentences with “Well, when we did it in New York…” especially when it was actually New Jersey and 1973.
12. Purposely do some blocking wrong over and over again until they just change it to whatever you want.
13. Improvise fight choreography. So spontaneous!
14. Bardsplain Shakespeare to every person involved in the production in any way regardless of their experience level.
San Francisco Theater Pub 