ON THE VERGE

Well, here we are, on the far side of "The Verge". Costumes have been hung up, scripts are being forgotten as we speak, and I saw pictures on Facebook today of that spectacular set being dismantled and relegated to history. I've been trying to figure out how I want to tell the story of the last couple of days, because there is a story to be told there. I'm just not sure how to go about telling it. The usual Facebook post, which would read something like, "Fantastic performances from the cast and crew of "The Verge" for the past couple of nights! Great houses, good energy, and we managed to leave it all out there for our final show on Sunday despite a few minor obstacles..." somehow doesn't quite tell the story.
I considered telling it in one of my first-person, observational essays. It would have started with a little background about how I don't really drink alcohol very much any more, at least not enough to actually get drunk. The proverbial "glass of wine at Christmas", as it were. Then it would segway into a description of how disoriented I felt when I got out of bed before dawn to go to the bathroom, before I realized exactly how dark it was in the house and exactly how wobbly I was at that moment, ending with a spectacular face-first dive into the pillows, safe, as if I had just completed an arduous climb of K2. Then, I had thought up a couple of fairly droll turns of a phrase to describe my condition the following day, such as, "While my misery on Sunday mercifully registered a mere 3 on the Richter Scale of Hangovers, it was sufficient enough to prevent me from ingesting anything more substantial than coffee and bottled water all day; and sufficient enough to warrant that arched-eyebrow, sideways sneer from my husband which very clearly was meant to say, 'Suffer, idiot.'" 
But that was pretty much all I had, and I couldn't come up with a good way to actually conclude an essay like that, so I thought I'd have to try something else. So, I thought I would try to fictionalize the events, and tell the story that way. I came up with some fairly promising characters: Veronica, the leading actress "of a certain age", who abandoned a mercurial career as a hard-driving, trash-talking, tough-as-nails district attorney from the mean streets of Ann Arbor to pursue her dream of a life on the stage; Betty, the wide-eyed ingenue who descends into a sordid life of boxed wine and one night stands; Ralph, the crotchety stage manager with a heart of gold and a secret; and Monty, the dashing yet sexually frustrated heterosexual leading man (well, it is fiction after all). The story would begin as Anthony, the narrator, walks in through the stage door of the Fillmore Theatre, a dowager, Gilded Age theater in a small town called something like Oakville or Maple Falls, something like that. It is the last night of a six month run of a play called "The Edge", about the moral dilemma of a female scientist, responsible in part for the invention of Round-Up. Anthony sees Ralph, the ornery but lovable stage manager sitting in the corridor, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips, a copy of the Racing Form open on his lap and still wearing sunglasses. "Oh, my god," Ralph would hack, "I feel like shit." 
Anthony would respond by saying something like, "You too? I'm glad I'm not the only one." The story would then flash back to the previous night, a blurry montage of Korean cars filled with marijuana smoke, vodka stingers and shots of $30 French brandy. The reader would be drawn back into the present when Ralph removes his sunglasses, rubs the bridge of his nose, and says, "Yeah, well, wait until you see Monty." The rest of the story could be a humorous yet poignant reconstruction of the events which led up to Monty, the leading man, a complex character, rich with contradictions, waking up in a hospital three hundred miles away while a surgeon is gingerly reattaching a severed thumb. 
But there's the problem on how to portray Anthony, the narrator. Should he be presented as the Tragic Talent: an immensely capable character actor whose name no one can ever seem to actually remember, or the Heroic Everyman: someone who basically lives a fulfilled life and is happy just to draw a paycheck doing something he loves? Either interpretation would draw scoffs and sneers from a certain percentage of the people who think they know the writer, despite the fact, once again, that it is fiction.
And, as always, there is the quandary of how to end the story. Something amusing yet somehow resonant, so that the reader doesn't end up asking himself, "OK, so what was the point of that?" I couldn't really come up with anything, so I abandoned the idea of fiction. 
And I've already done a few posts about this production, the kind filled with glowing prose about the Theatre Experience, which inevitably end up using words like "craft", "talent", and "process", so I didn't want to do that over again. So, what am I left with? Journalism class, I guess. Who, what, where, that sort of thing. 
So: The cast and crew of "The Verge" descended on a local watering hole on Saturday night for an impromptu and probably somewhat premature "cast party". A number of us, myself included, got, well, hammered. The next day, the last day of the production, was, of course, a matinée. Many of us, myself included once again, were somewhat "fragile" (that's a euphemism). One of us (not me this time) spent the morning getting sick and wondering whether he would be able to make it to the theater at all, and another cast member, somewhere between said watering hole and home, had managed to acquire a number of stitches, as well as other contusions and abrasions, which he was trying rather unsuccessfully to conceal with pancake. Nevertheless, the show did go on, and we were fabulous, I must say; leaving it all out there on the stage as one is wont to do for the last night. Or afternoon, as it were. By the end of the play, we all felt sufficiently human enough to convene at the swank Red Inn, where we were able to toast to one another and enjoy the last moments of an incredibly satisfying project. Not surprisingly, though, a few of us, myself included, were clinking glasses filled with iced tea or Coca Cola.
So, another production under the belt. Another family of friends, another script full of lines which will soon be all but forgotten. This one, well, this one was a really good one; the kind of experience that makes me want to do it again. 
And one day, who knows, maybe I'll write that story. And wouldn't it be awfully amusing, or ignominious, if you were to find yourself in it?