It’s been said that a bad dress rehearsal leads to a good opening night. Whoever said that never had to deal with a sticky floor on opening night.

A couple hundred years ago when I was still in graduate school, I took part in the play Flowers for Algernon (based on Daniel Keyes’ Novel.) I portrayed one of the doctors (although I don’t remember if I was Dr. Nemur or Dr. Strauss. I think I was Strauss.)

The production was directed by a fellow graduate student who was submitting it as part of his Master’s degree requirements. However, he had a couple handicaps. First, there were other major productions going on meaning the acting pool at Kansas State U had been spread thin and 2) he wasn’t particularly well liked in the department which thinned down the acting pool even more. (That’s how I was able to get a substantial part.)

As a result, he had lots of first time actors, including the lead actors, and a cast that was much bigger than it needed to be. This meant he had to spend a lot of time doing “trust” activities and exercises that got us working together as a team whilst simultaneously trying to teach the bulk of the cast how to act.

A few never quite got it down. One woman had one line “I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes” but could never get the inflection down. It always came out as “I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my OWN eyes.” (As opposed to someone else’s?)

A lot of stage acting is based on listening and being in the moment. Although you practice lines and blocking, the way a person delivers a line can change the entire scene. If you’re expected to have an angry reaction to an angry line, but the other person says their line calmly, you have to react the scene you’re in, not the scene you practiced. If you don’t, it looks weird to the audience. You have to simultaneously know what you’re supposed to do but can’t anticipate what you’re going to do. When it works, it’s brilliant and you see why people like acting.

However, as a group we didn’t work together very well and things didn’t look good. I didn’t even tell my family about the play because I expected a disaster.

Then, oddly, the disaster came, but it actually kind of worked out.

On opening night, as we prepared to go on, we were informed that the stage manager had made a huge mistake. He’d used glossy black paint to prepare the stage instead of matte black paint. This made the stage sticky. As we walked we made ripping-Velcro noises and if we stood in place our shoes stuck to the stage making quick exits difficult. However, in the spirit of “the show must go on” we were told to make the best of it.

The results were great. We started cutting out our blocking which mean we had to listen and observe and basically be in the moment. I remember one scene where I was supposed to turn away from a character then turn back and deliver a line. Instead, since my shoes were stuck to the floor, I stayed facing her and changed the way I spoke instead.

Audience members from the department told us we were the most focused cast they’d ever seen. It felt great on stage, too.

Unfortunately, the next night the stage was back to normal and we went back to being ordinary.