EVERY WEEKEND IN MAY

His blood sugar was low.  He could feel the cold sweat bubbling under his character’s hat as the spotlight glazed his face.

 

The character of “The Lieutenant” was supposed to be a bit of a nut, so the switching of an occasional line here and there or a random stutter wasn’t completely out of place or out of character.  But the monologue – his very first appearance in the play – was when it all went wrong.  Balloons never went up this far.

 

Other actors on stage stood stunned, their minds jumping ahead, trying to flip the pages of scripts in their memories to salvage the first act.  Never happened.

 

It was a wholly different animal now that “The Lieutenant,” the only character to drive the show, had gone up.  It was like an experiment, some theatre of the absurd.  An actor on acid trying to plug along even though his words were coming out slow and seemingly in another language.

 

And the audience never even noticed.

-SLL