← Columns

Why I Stay Indoors

The Source

The insect could not possibly have been as large as it seemed as it crawled down my back and took up residence inside the rear strap of my suspenders. We were halfway through Act One of “Tonight with Coonridge” at New Salem’s Theatre in the Park. A few friends and I had put together a collection of my newspaper columns with a bit of music on a very hot July night in Menard County. Lincoln’s New Salem is located in the middle of a whole lot of nowhere and we were sitting under the only bug-attracting lights within miles. And we’re not talking about your bathroom light bulbs here, Bubba. The stage is lit with about twenty lighting fixtures of over 500 watts each. This is heaven for a bug in the middle of summer and the little critters were having some sort of convention that evening. I think that the trespasser that crawled down by back was the chairman. Such are the joys of doing outdoor theatre and the reason I avoid it these days. Our area boasts two out-in-the open venues, Theatre in the Park, and the Springfield Muni Opera. I’ve played both of them and now gladly turn it over to a generation that’s younger and doesn’t wear suspenders. Heat is of course the main drawback to doing theatre outdoors. This is especially fatiguing if you rent the costumes. Rental costumes are made for the long haul, made of heavy material, often reinforced with metal wiring, and designed to weather hundreds of performances. Although I’m not ready to perform in a production of the all-nude musical, Oh Calcutta, I often yearn to be wearing about ten pounds less clothing onstage. Working for Burrus in the summertime I learned that the best way to cool down overheated de-tasselers was to pour cool water on their wrists, close to the veins in their arms, so when we ran our production of “Abraham” for ten years at New Salem I kept a bucket of ice water back stage for easy dipping. Of course it was lukewarm by the end of the show but it provided some relief. I’ve known actors who sew ice packs into their costumes, but I’ve never had the nerve to do that. Ben Franklin would lose his standing as a Founding Father if his ice pack busted. Franklin was plagued by gout, but I know nothing about his prostate. Then comes the problem of weather. You take two months to write a show, you rehearse it for six weeks, then you’re held hostage by the weather man. Theatre in the Park has a sweet little indoor theatre that can be used in case of emergency, but squeezing a sellout crowd of 400 into a space holding only 150 can cause problems. The Muni Opera in Springfield has no such rain contingency and the audience huddles together in the refreshment shed or their cars until the storm passes. . . if it passes. With the Muni’s curtain time at 8:30 an hour’s interruption can find you travelling back across Lake Springfield at midnight. I was in a production of “Brigadoon” at the Muni and never took a final bow. I was on the road back to Arenzville. But there’s more than bugs and heat that has caused me to stick to air-conditioning once summer theatre rolls around. Things like . . . coyotes. The Menard County woods seem full of them and they have somehow been trained to start howling every time a love ballad comes up in a show. And try doing a show on the Fourth of July when the Petersburg fireworks start exploding a few miles away. “Oh what a beautiful morning. .” (BANG!) “ . . .Oh, what a beautiful day. . .” (BOOM!) “ . . I’ve got a beautiful feeling. . .” (KERPOW!) “. . . everything’s coming my way. . .(KER-BLOOEY!) The cat that wondered onto the stage during our production of a show proved to be a problem, and my leading lady was unsure of what to do. When the beast ambled onto the stage the audience began to laugh and so the cat stopped and looked at the audience. I was close enough to throw something at the kitty but I was afraid I’d lose the cat lovers in the audience so we all simply waited until the intruder decided to wander off. I’m just glad the thing didn’t insist on taking a bow. Theatre in the Park unwisely put up Purple Martin houses near the stage several years and frankly, I can’t think of a worse idea. Dive-bombing birds can ruin a love scene. For hundreds of years there was only outdoor theatre. The ancient Greeks invented the genre we now know as live theatre, there surely there were bugs in Athens, and I know that it was hot. Perhaps togas provided more breeze.