Word: spelvin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hour long, the theater offers another Durang comedy, The Actor's Nightmare to flesh out the evening. A mildly humorous play, The Actor's Nightmare is based on one very clever idea that nonetheless runs out of steam very fast. The story opens in medias res when George Spelvin, played by Jeff Brooks, finds himself backstage of a theater where an abrupt stage manager informs him that the play's leading man has been injured and George must take his place. Unfortunately George doesn't even know his own name much less his lines. "Am I an actor? I thought...
...Actor's Nightmare is an In joke. The simple non-hero is named George Spelvin (Jeff Brooks), a theatrical pseudonym for an actor playing a secondary role in a play. Spelvin has unaccountably wandered into stage company that he has never kept. The time is the present, but the other actors arbitrarily inform him that he is Edwin Booth's understudy in Hamlet and must go on tonight since "Eddie" has been injured in a car crash...
...play-within-a-play begins, Spelvin enters dressed in black Renaissance garb, but the setting is a terrace of a posh hotel overlooking the harbor at Nice, and the first lines addressed to him are from Noel Coward's Private Lives. The plots thicken and boil. Beckett's Endgame and Happy Days are intermingled as well. With zany aplomb, Durang combines absurdist juxtapositions of lines and characters in Spelvin's massive identity crisis...
...play's final sequence, Spelvin's role is that of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. For the first time, Spelvin is more than baffled. He feels a chill of apprehension, and rightly so, as he hears the stage directions: "The Executioner will be played by himself." When the curtain rises on curtain calls, Spelvin does not. This mordant conclusion echoes that of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Man is a simple soul inadvertently entangled in a blind mess called life with nary a clue as to its meaning...