Lindsey Markel Writes About True Things

Earlier this week a newspaper reporter came to write a preview article, and when she asked me what I thought of the play, I said it was strange and beautiful and poetic and poignant, and I meant them all in equal measure. It’s about a girl (yes you may have heard the myth, no it isn’t required reading) who dies on her wedding day and, after arriving in the Underworld, doesn’t remember anything about being alive. She forgets how to use language; when she opens her mouth to speak to the audience, the sound of swarming bees comes out. She can’t remember her husband’s name, can’t describe how it felt to leave her body when she died, and doesn’t remember her long-dead father when he arrives, saying her name joyously, which to her sounds like an exotic language, although she can’t describe that either. “It’s like a fruit!” she says, listening to him talk.

I don’t talk a lot about acting and I never have; truthfully, I find that people are only rarely interested in hearing about my theatrical hobby, which is not at all surprising here in ye olde smalle towne Midwest. Sometimes people come to see me because they know me and want to be nice, and I find out in the lobby afterward that it was the first play they’d ever seen. And I can’t ever say that I’m surprised. Acting was one of those secret childhood hobbies for me, something I thought I’d made up; then something I quietly honed for ten years in a church-turned-theatre with a capacity of thirty seats, tucked away in a town of a thousand.

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Backstage during a play, there is sometimes a lot of waiting, or something that looks a lot like waiting. Actors wait, reading by dim light, listening to iPods, or knitting quietly, the clicking of needles punctuating the muted sounds of conversation from the stage. The stage manager sits, idly turning pages of a script, occasionally setting off sound cues, while the director paces maniacally, ears perked like a setter, having placed all control of her show into the tenuously held hands of the actors and the audience.

I recently played a small part as a prostitute in The Station Theatre’s production of Jean Genet’s “The Balcony,” wherein I spent about three hours per night waiting, my hooked garters carving rivets into the backs of my thighs. The story takes place in a whorehouse, so I wasn’t the only working girl with time to kill; scantily-clad females splayed across prop coffins, sat cross-legged in robes, and curled up on the floor, their fuck-me heels daintily set to the side. Actors who were about to go onstage performed their secret rituals; they stretched, counted, checked props obsessively, like witch doctors willing their scenes to go well. As it is with nearly any local theatre production, a survey of the room at any given time would have revealed a roster of actors I admire, and have admired since the first time I took my seat in a Champaign-Urbana theater, fully-clothed and ready to hear a story.

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“Suddenly, I was casting rappers and teaching them to act, instead of casting actors and teaching them to rap,” says director Aaron Polk on casting local hip-hop artist Krukid in “The Bomb-itty of Errors,” an award-winning “ad-rap-tation” of the Shakespeare classic “The Comedy of Errors.” He adds, “I’m certainly more qualified to teach rappers to act.”

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