I'm doing a(nother) thing

The Lisbon Players strike again

First: A reminder that Amy will be Sonaya Williams’ guest on the Your Expat Life podcast tomorrow - Tuesday, 23 September - at 3 pm(GM+1) / 10 am (Eastern).
Click here to go straight to the broadcast!
If you’ve got questions for her, drop ‘em in the podcast chat!

On Tuesday morning, September 16, my phone rang. In general, I’m not a huge fan of the phone.¹ Since we’ve moved here, the dang thing is downright terrifying.²

Last Tuesday, however, my caller ID read “Celia (The Unfriend) Williams.”³ Celia was the director and one of the stars of The Unfriend, the fun and funny play I’d been stage manager for in late spring/early summer. I accepted the call.

When a director asks you if you’re in town the next few weeks, that’s a good sign. It’s even better if you’re actually going to be in town. Which I was.⁴

So, Celia explained, the next production from the Lisbon Players needed a stage manager. Was I interested?

What followed has been a fascinating ride. But to fully understand the situation, you need a bit of background information.

*cue dreamy harp flashback music*

Lisbon Players

Founded in 1947, the Lisbon Players is the oldest active theater company in Portugal. Until recently, they were peacefully and prolifically performing in and maintaining Estrela Hall, their very own space near Jardim da Estrela. The company owned neither the building nor the land it was on, though, and in 2000 the owners⁵ announced a plan to sell the site. The Lisbon Players went to court in 2008 claiming essentially squatters’ rights. In 2010, they lost the case and the British government was granted ownership of the property. In 2016, the land was sold to a Portuguese development company, and December 13, 2019 marked the final performance in Estrela Hall, which has since been torn down.

Post-pandemic, the Lisbon Players, now homeless, has been working with theater companies throughout the city to find space for their performances. Over the past five years, they have staged ten productions across eight venues. While building new bridges and cementing existing relationships has been a generally positive experience for the people I’ve talked to, there are a lot of logistical hurdles that go along with these arrangements.

Like sets and rehearsal space

When a theater company has a place of its own, building a set and leaving it on stage for the cast and crew to settle into is a relatively simple matter. Furniture and props can be moved in. Lights can be hung and tweaked as necessary. Sound effects and music can be piped in through the same speakers in rehearsals that the performers and audience will be listening to during the run. After a few weeks, the space starts to feel comfortable and familiar. By the time audiences are allowed in, the show practically runs on auto-pilot.

When a theater company is using another organization’s space, things are different. Because Escola de Mulheres had one of its own productions using the stage, most of the cast and crew of The Unfriend never even saw the venue until three days before opening night.

Each performance of The Unfriend required the presence of eleven people and two sets, one of which was the interior of a house.

The sets and lights went up on Monday and we had a mere handful of hours before Thursday’s opener to acclimate ourselves to the house most of the characters in the play would have been living in for years.

Set of The Unfriend. Photo by Scott. The bathroom is on the right, the front door is open in the back left. One small corner of the bottom stair is barely visible in the lower left, next to the chair leg.

Rehearsals prior to opening week happened across three different venues - private homes of two cast members, and a hall used by an orchestra for their practices. The rooms in the homes weren’t large enough to allow the actors to move around as they would during the show, and the orchestra space required shifting dozens of chairs and music stands to the edges of the room. We also had to fabricate a rudimentary couch, kitchen counter, two entry doors, and a bathroom every time we went there. And, of course, the dimensions didn’t match those of the stage at Escola de Mulheres.

Actors on The Unfriend entered and exited the set through four different doors, climbed up and down stairs, and moved through the entire stage passing in front of, around, and behind other actors. They sat. They stood. They used computers and phones. They gestured at things. They poured drinks and and ate food. They rang doorbells, dropped house keys into a little bowl by the front door, opened refrigerators, and put flowers in vases.

Nearly all of that and more had to be adjusted at least a little, and sometimes a lot, between Monday and Thursday of opening week.

On the second night of the show, an actor stumbled on the rug. On the fourth night of the show, the interior doorknob came off the bathroom door in a different actor’s hand. On the fifth night of the show, that actor didn’t trust the doorknob (which had been firmly re-attached) and tried to shut the door without using it.

None of these were major problems. But these are the types of things that wouldn’t have been problems at all had we been able to rehearse on the stage more than two or three times.

And because we were on another theater’s schedule, we needed to take our set down immediately following the final performance so something else could be built there the next morning. This left us with precious little time to celebrate what was a very successful run before all traces of the show had vanished.

Here, just for fun, is a time-lapse video that our set designer Alexandra Bochmann took of that set strike.

*cue dreamy harp back-to-present-day music*

The Event

So now that we’re caught up, let’s return to last Tuesday’s phone call.

The Lisbon Players’ next production, a monologue called The Event, had been scheduled to run in mid-November, according to Celia. Because the Lisbon Players is at the mercy of other theater companies’ timetables, the opening night date had been pushed up - twice - and was now scheduled for October 8.⁶ This news broke in late August. As it was August in Portugal, many key people, including the actor (it’s a monologue, there’s one actor), were away from Lisbon at the time.

Celia was calling me on September 16 to see if I could start rehearsing on September 18. For a production opening in 20 days.

Rehearse where? No idea yet. Still working on that.

-Could she send over the script for me to take a look at?

-Umm, let me … YES!

The script appeared in my inbox a short while later and I’d read less than a third of it before I said I wanted in. It’s by an American playwright named John Clancy.

Celia’s message to me read, in part:

The only way to explain the text is to know it, really, as it's hard to explain.

She’s right. It’s hard to explain.

But it is brilliantly written.

It’s funny and philosophical and introspective. Thought-provoking. And some people may sleep right through it. (Which would be ok; the actor actually invites them to do so. Even sings a lullaby.) It’s a roller coaster of emotions.

And it’s all performed by one person.

In a typical play, the actors have built-in support. A good cast will help each other when someone inevitably makes a mistake.

Every single performance on The Unfriend, something happened on stage that wasn’t in the script. One night an actor forgot to say, “I left the toilet seat down for you.” After a brief pause, a different actor chimed in with, “I see you left the toilet seat down for me,” which cued the first actor’s next line. Every night it was something different. But the show rolled on.

In a monologue? If you lose your train of thought, you’re on your own. Nobody’s bailing you out. No safety net, no parachute.

You know that dream you have? The one where you’re naked in the school cafeteria and everyone’s just sittin’ there starin’ atcha?

That’s pretty much the definition of a monologue.

(Ok. Yes. Fine. Nobody’s naked in The Event but you get my point. It is a very strange job.)

Who would willingly subject themselves to something like that?

Well, this guy, for one:

Soren Hellerup. Image taken from his agency’s website.

Listed on IMDB as 6’ 1½” (1.87 m), Soren Hellerup cuts a commanding presence but is affable, approachable, and ego-less. All of which makes him a pleasure to work with.

What Soren is doing is incredibly difficult.

Don’t believe me? Try this:

1. Grab the nearest novel to you.

2. Read the first 45 pages.

3. Stand up.

4. Recite those pages out loud, word-for-word, from memory. Without taking a drink or a break.

Still think you could handle it? Grab a novel in a different language and repeat steps 2-4 above.

You see, Søren (as his name appears in his Scandinavian credits) grew up in Denmark and didn’t speak English regularly until he went away to university in New York City.

His primary concern was that, though he’d been working with the script of The Event since May, he hadn’t yet had a native English speaker involved in the project. The project that was, suddenly and unexpectedly, 20 days away from opening. He wants to fine-tune his first appearance with the Lisbon Players - to make it as good as it can be.

We’ve written before about some of our challenges with Portuguese.

Soren is having fun with words like ‘irrevocably,’ ‘laden,’ ‘mired,’ and ‘ruefully.’

And - with abject apologies to John Clancy - ‘menacingly,’ ‘surreptitiously,’ and ‘treacherous’ have sent us to a thesaurus for more-pronounceable alternatives.

We just finished our third rehearsal a couple of hours ago. It was in my living room. We’ve considered rehearsing outdoors.

I know the location of Escola do Largo - the stage on which The Event will make its Portuguese premiere - but I’ve only seen photos of the interior. It’s a small place, seats about 40. Intimate. Perfect for a show like this.

We might have a chance to set foot inside before October 6. We might not.

But at least there’s not a big set that needs to be built.

It’s just a man. Alone. On stage in a pool of light. Standing in front of strangers, reciting words written by someone else. Someone who went to University City High School, which sits just a few blocks from where Amy and I lived for 12 years before we moved to Portugal.

It’s a small world.

It’s a weird world.

And it’s a good play.

That’s all for now.

Love from Lisbon,

Scott

P.S. If you’d like tickets, they’re available here.

P.P.S. If you’d like to sign a petition urging the Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (Lisbon’s City Council) to make good on its years-ago promise to help the Lisbon Players find a new permanent home, you can do so here.

1. Well. My parents - were they still alive - would tell you that when I was in high school I tied up the house line quite a lot. Since then, though? Not as much.

2. Most of the time when I cringe away from my ringing phone, the incoming call is from “Portugal.” Since I almost never answer and the country refuses to leave a message, I have yet to learn what it wants from me.

3. Doesn’t everyone add a parenthetical qualifier when they enter a new contact so when you see it three years later you aren’t going, “Who the heck is that?”

4. Other than the first weekend in October when Amy and I will be celebrating our 28th wedding anniversary in the company of some of our dearest friends.

5. It’s slightly unclear who, exactly the owners were, but “the British government” gets tossed around a lot in conversation about this. The entire story lives here and it’s worth a read.

6. This apparently involved a combination of poor record keeping and a change of personnel at the venue.