Pointless Theatre Kid Anecdotes: Making Dust Fly

Behold! A new article series!

Pointless Theatre Kid Anecdotes is very much what it says on the tin: stories from my dramatic escapades, theatrical and otherwise, which I share because I feel like it...and no one can stop me.

Admittedly, the title does contain a bit of a redundancy. After all, as The Golden Girls' Sophia Petrillo (played by the late, great Estelle Getty) so eloquently put it, "With a story, you get a point. With an anecdote? Pure entertainment!"

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In my junior year of high school, we did a production of Neil Simon's The Good Doctor. For the unfamiliar, The Good Doctor is a two-act play comprised of a series of comedic vignettes, all inspired by the short stories of Russian author and playwright Anton Chekov. The vignettes are all connected through a framing device wherein the writer of said vignettes—implied to be Chekov himself—introduces and comments on some of the scenes. I was ultimately cast in four roles in this production, one of which was Kistunov, the banker in "A Defenseless Creature". A friend of mine (who I'll keep anonymous, for courtesy's sake) was cast opposite me as the titular "defenseless creature".

"A Defenseless Creature" concerns Madame Schukin, the wife of an ill and unjustly laid-off college assessor who seeks to collect her husband's last paycheck. However, the college refuses to acknowledge their debt, and Madame Schukin consequently seeks payment from Kistunov's bank, an institution which Kistunov himself repeatedly states has no actual connection to her or her husband's situation.

Since we were both teenagers cast in roles written for adults middle-aged or older, my friend and I wore old-age make up for our parts—pencil lines on our faces for wrinkles and hair lacquer to gray our hair. Of course, this being a Chekov-inspired show, we weren't the only ones using these things.

On our opening night, we ended up running out of hair lacquer before my friend could get theirs done. As a last minute solution, they put baby powder in their hair to give it the desired gray color.

There's a part in "A Defenseless Creature" where Madame Schukin demonstrates to Kistunov how she's been fainting on a regular basis as a result of all the stress she's had to endure. She relates to him that she has, for months now, had to care not only for her own husband, children, and pets, but also for her sister's family, resulting in domestic chaos. Due to the immense amount of stress she has been under, she has been unable to keep any food down, and has grown frail.

Well, when my friend and I got to that part of the scene, they did their faint on cue...and a big cloud of dust arose from their head.

The audience went nuts. So did all of the cast and crew members who were watching from the wings. I somehow managed to keep my composure. Truth be told, I was planning an ad lib in my head which I ended up not using. Once the laughter died down, my friend got back up and we continued the scene like nothing unusual had happened.

Meanwhile, our director, watching from the audience, was nonplussed. She texted the head of the stage crew, "Did I just see a cloud of dust rise from this person's head?"

"Yup," he replied.

After the show, we explained to our director what had happened with the hair lacquer and the baby powder. She said that she would go out and buy more hair lacquer for our next show tomorrow, and that if any of us ever ended up needing to powder our hair, that we should be sure to go over it with hairspray so that the "dust cloud incident" would not be repeated.

One of the stage managers of that show, another friend of mine, later related to me that she'd been sent to purchase the gray hair lacquer for the rest of our production's run, and had been instructed to "buy every can of gray hairspray in stock".

The "dust cloud incident" was, indeed, not repeated.