A Spork in the Road

We produced The Wisdom of Eve last week/weekend, and as usual I wore many hats: sound tech the first three nights, stand-in for one of the smaller roles on Saturday night, and combination dresser/battery replacer/sound tech on Sunday.

Saturday night I donned a blonde wig in order to play Vera Franklin. My dark eyebrows are starting to come back in enough that it looked a little odd, but not terrible. Even with my handful of lines I had a couple of costume changes, one of them onstage, so I was happy to find dresses that could all be unzipped and stepped into/out of. The Sinead O’Connor look doesn’t really work for a 1950’s period piece.

The play, which is the stage adaptation of the 1950 classic All About Eve, has some great lines and undeniably vivid characters. However, unlike the film, the stage play is very flabby on a line level. A lot of arduous explanation and recapping and fluffy dialogue that does nothing for the plot. Every night, following the script for sound cues, I itched to take a red pen to the page.

I thought of Jim Kelly’s rule that for the final draft of a piece you should cut it down by 30%. Would that playwright Mary Orr knew that principle!