Actors being actors

One of the last plays I did in Denmark before moving to the United States was a comedy about shooting a classic film while the production goes off the rails. My character was an actor who played an actor, which added some fun layering.

The local stage was pretty worn and compact, with cramped space in the wings and underneath, but we all made the most of it and did goofy things. Part of my role was to charm the ladies but very badly, and before coming on for a scene like that we’d found one of those fake roses with a metal wire going through the stem. The simple idea was that I should make a woman swoon with some hopeless dialogue and then hand her the flower from my chest pocket.

Because the stem was a bit too long to fit outright in the pocket of my leather jacket costume, I had to bend the wire so the rose could sit neatly until it was needed later in the scene. When time came to pluck the flower out of the pocket and hand it over, the wire had become a hook that got stuck in the zipper on the way up. Struggling with a prop once would look silly, so I of course immediately began to bounce around on stage, pretending that the flower was impossible to remove, yanking at it, exploring every corner of the set and flailing around the poor girl who almost managed to keep it together. The flower had become unstuck immediately at the second pull, but in the moment I felt it was necessary to go with the flow and keep up the illusion. This became one of the big laughs from opening night, and we decided to keep the gag for the next performances. That sort of stuff is good fun.

We managed to pull in a few hundred people to see us all be ridiculous.