Saturday Oct 3rd - Two-show Day in Butare

We are to show up at the theatre for 1:30 pm call, ready ourselves, and if an audience shows up, we will do a show.  If not, there will be no show until the evening.

Audience trickles in, some actors sit in the space while others sit in the dressing rooms below the stage.  Their laughter floats up through the vents into the empty space.  Eventually we have an audience and we begin, an hour late, at 3:30 pm.  Again, there is no one in the seats on stage left.  Empty rows of orange charirs facing us down.  Full seats in centre and stage right. 

Act One goes like stink and we retreat to the dressing rooms.  I am chewing on GasEx strips like they are fruit roll-ups.  The tension is low-grade, different from last night, but the clarity of the show from last night has been retained.

At intermission, we become aware that there is something happening at the doors of the theatre.  There are people outside demanding to be let into the theatre, something about a soccer game scheduled to be shown in our space.  There is a crowd forming.  We are kept out of it, but we definitely know something big is happening outside when Act Two begins. 

We can hear the sound of a mob outside.  It is terrifying.  We adjust our volume and keep going. 
Half of the audience on stage right has disappeared.  (Later we find out that they have gone up to the security booth to watch the soccer match on the television there - sports wins out over theatre yet again...) 

We do, however, have new audience members in the house.  Small children - two in the front row downstage of us, and one small child sitting on stage left, maybe nine years old, slumped in a chair right beside Layne Coleman.  They are both lit in Rebecca Picherak's gorgeous guerilla lighting.  Both Layne and the child are wearing clothes of roughly the same colour.  Layne will later say that he felt this child was the ghost of his character's younger self.  It is eerily beautiful to see them there together as Act Two begins, and gains power almost to match the strength of the mob outside. 

I realize that the machete scene is coming up, and wonder what this child will think.  I wonder if he understands any of this play.  I wonder if he has ever seen live theatre.  So many questions flit through my mind as Act Two unfurls, borne from the presence of this small child.

We finish the play to brief applause.  The child does not applaud, merely watches silently from his chair.
There is no talkback today, and we flee downstairs to our dressing room.  I think it may be a good idea to clear out asap, because of the mob outside.  Everyone is jangled.  We change and charge upstairs to a crew of Rwandans and Volcano technicians changing over the space rapidly, so that a giant screen can be raised to show the soccer match in between our two shows.  We can hear the audience already in the seats of the auditorium behind the curtain.

We flee to the Ibis Hotel for pasta before our next show this evening.

Post by Tara