The opening night production of Beets went quite well. The house was packed and the cast & crew rose to the occasion.  The audience was quite responsive to the script and as a result we found out where the real laugh lines were. The trick to acting is to lift a 1 dimensional string of characters from a page and give them depth and color.

The only production snag was with the house lights. For some reason the software wasn’t able to call for the house lights to dim. The lighting guy opened the door of an obscure closet in the vaudeville-era backstage to reveal a glowing, LED festooned, 6 ft tower of computerized widgetry. Working feverishly and with green pinpoints of light reflecting off his smudged bifocals (a la Dave Bowman), he finally toggled the right button and got the house lights to darken. Otherwise the software-driven lights and sound worked well.

I wasn’t nervous until 15 minutes before showtime. Standing in the wings I tried to recite my lines in my head, but just couldn’t summon them from the turbid depths. I don’t mind sayin’, this was a distressing development. But after I walked on stage the lines came on cue and we got the thing done.

From the comments at the reception after the show it was apparent that the audience understood the story and were emotionally drawn into it. For two hours we suspended reality and had a shared experience. This is the goal of the writer, director, cast, and crew. When it works it is an amazing thing.

Hard to believe- our show starts in just a few hours. I’ve given my 2 comp tickets to family. Folks are forkin’ over real money to sit and watch us do this thing. Ticket sales have been strong, so everyone is jazzed. If anything, the cast is a bit over rehearsed. We’re happy just to get the thing going. The sound and lighting cues are set.

Th’ Gaussling plays a sugar beet farmer, which ain’t much of a stretch, havin’ growed up on an Iowa hog and corn farm. Turns out that my step-mother grew up on a beet farm in this area and is aware of the Greeley WWII POW camp’s location. There were supposedly ~155 POW camps in the US by the end of the war.

It is a decent story and certainly makes for a good dramatic situation. My part is a minor role, though I am in 5 scenes. In terms of the storytelling, my character is a device contrived by the writer to make sure that certain information gets on the table so the audience can get the facts and circumstances in context. This is part of the playwriters craft that I had failed to appreciate previously.

It is a good play and I am lucky to have been a part of it. Quiet backstage!

This morning we moved our set into the theatre that we will be performing in for the next two weekends. This is my first acting performance in a decent theatre. It has clean dressing rooms below the stage and reasonably up-to-date lighting and sound capability. The theatre seats 400 and has been well refurbished over the last few years.

We have a tech crew running the lights and sound, a props & costume crew for scene changes, a makeup person, a set builder, and a few other gofers who handle the 10,000 details. All we have to do is remember our lines and avoid falling into the orchestra pit. The lead character has been sick for the last 10 days, so the producers have been nervous. He is a quantum computing physicist who happens to dig acting. The physicist gets the girl. The chemist gets to shout at people and whittle.

Last friday’s local paper featured a full page closeup of me, Th’ Gaussling, hamming it up on stage. Mother of pearl! Today’s thrill of standing on the set and looking into the auditorium was soon replaced by waves of nausea at the realization that this thing is really going to happen. Holy smokes. What have I done?