Being a part of the Dearly Departed cast has given me a new view point on live theatre and how it functions, a few things that I noticed more so than being on the other side of the stage is that the Audience Fuels the actors more so than we think. Being behind stage while there were scenes going on a lot of times we found ourselves sitting in silence trying to see what, where, how hard, and how long the audience would be laughing at the jokes. We would use this to somewhat psych ourselves up and allow us to know when we would expect to need to pause for laughter or when we would need to emphasize more so on the some lines. It was hard for me do this with no prior acting experience but near the last three shows I found it easier to deal with mentally in pausing the lines for a few seconds but staying in character and pausing your body and facial features while everyone is laughing at something you did is harder than it seems.
Another thing that I noticed is that the audience won’t really know if you have a line mess up if you are quick to re-gather yourself you can play it off and get back into your lines and the majority of people will go with it. Judson and I had one of these moments on Sunday’s performance and not many people noticed but a few did which scared me on stage for a second but we were able to get back into character after a sec or two.
The audiences energy before and after the show was excited in the beginning and at the end downstairs was just ridiculous loud and really energetic. I’m not sure if the audience knew what they were coming to see or what kind of humor this play was going to be, because once they entered the theatre all they see is the backdrop which is all southern with General Lee x2, A giant bottle of whiskey, an alligator, and Nascar. The audience was probably going to expect a lot of deep south style stereotypical jokes but once the play started and they realized that the jokes were pretty universal they opened up and it was hard to slow them down.
The audience responded really well to the show we all felt. Our slowest night for performing we think was on Wednesday but every performance after that was almost a full house, even on Sunday’s matinee performance there was a decent sized crowd which shocked a lot of us. When we would go down stairs after the show and greet the audience we would get a lot of compliments somewhere around the effect of great job, wonderful play, loved your character, this is my third time seeing this play this week and it keeps getting better and better. A lot of the time they would be focused on Delightful and her character after the show because she had two words the whole play but had a lot of funny moments with props and Sam did a wonderful job playing her. This would somewhat confirm the humor of the crowd that is was somewhat toilet humor because they would be fixated on the burps, odd food eating habits, and uni-brow of delightful instead of the quick complex zings that each character would throw at others.
This play is without a doubt though opened up my eyes to all that goes into a play and how much hard work it is for everyone to put on a show. I would recommend everyone in class to try out for a play because it is the most fun I have had in college yet and you meet a lot of great people.