Your
True Tales
July 2005 – Page
26
Ghost
Understudy
by Susan
I used to do a fair amount of hack acting. Community theatre, summer musicals, off-key signing in the chorus, and bad tap dancing. I rarely got an actual dramatic part ("too tall; too blonde; too something") so when I was cast in as Rowena in Neil Simon's "Biloxi Blues" I was thrilled, if I overlooked the specially rigged bomber bra the director insisted upon.
Rowena didn't appear for quite some time in this play, which had as its premise the World War Two enlistment woes of a young New Yorker named Eugene and his gang of misfit comrades. Rowena got to sit in the back, alone, reading Vogue and the tabloids, until the appropriate time to make her bad-lingerie booty call.
Rowena also smoked. In real life, that is, and one of the rituals I had -- out of character -- was to smoke half a cigarette outside, during the first act. I'd just toss a sweatshirt on over the unfashionable attire, slide my feet into Rowena's feathered mules, and stumble through the backstage area to the exit door.
The dressing rooms, and a large backstage area, sat next to an equally large work space that was accessed by a small, unlit corridor. A blue safety light illuminated the work space area, so that anyone traversing it to access the exit door wouldn't trip on their ungainly feathered feet and break a leg. It was this path I took that night, as I did every night, my cigarette and lighter tucked in my sweatshirt pocket. As I left the well- lit backstage area and started down the short corridor, I focused ahead on the end of the corridor, to adjust my vision to the blue light of the work space, and there he was.
Walking rather quickly, an actor dressed in a uniform similar to that of the male characters in the play crossed in front of the end of the corridor, making his way through the work space and towards the exit door. "Hello," I said. He was moving quickly and acknowledged me with a brief sharp nod. Dark hair, tan uniform, two black stripes. I wondered if we had an understudy, but we didn't have understudies. And if we did, then why on earth wasn't he on stage with the rest? He ought to be; it's the scene with all the soldiers in it. And then he was gone. He didn't vaporize, explode, melt or decompose. He just wasn't, all of a sudden. He was there, and then he wasn't there, but after he'd disappeared I saw the exit door open and then shut.
Curious? You bet. Scared? No, it happened too fast. I walked out through the door, moved about ten feet away, lit my cigarette, and watched as the door opened, this time from the outside, and then shut. Perhaps he'd been taking a cigarette break as well.
I thought about it later that night. Earlier, during rehearsals, we'd been called up to an attic that formed the costume shop, and while up there alone I had an overwhelming "vision" of the building being consumed by a raging, angry fire.
A bit of investigation revealed that the theatre group had been the idea of a man who shortly after its inception enlisted as a soldier in World War Two (which duty he survived), and that the original theatre building, a church, had burned to the ground, necessitating a new venue, which was the one I had been performing in when I saw the actor who wasn't appearing in "Biloxi Blues."
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