Warning: Acting may be dangerous to your health

[rsc]

Last night jwg and I went to the Gloucester stage production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. However, owing to some unexpected drama, the journey could not be completed.

Somewhere deep in the fourth and last act, the older brother Jamie, while seriously drunk, says something that so enrages his younger brother Edmund that the latter punches him in the jaw and knocks him down. In this particular instance, Joe Pacheco, playing Jamie, misplaced his fall and hit his head on the corner of a piece of furniture. House lights up, cast and crew stop what they're doing to attend to the profusely-bleeding Pacheco, people rush off to (presumably) summon medical help. It was pretty scary, but it seems that the only damage he sustained was a nasty gash that probably required stiches. Needless to say, there was no way the performnace could continue.

I certainly hope the actor is all right. He never lost consciousness, and indeed could be heard saying that he wished he could keep going and finish the show. I don't think he really supposed that could happen.

Someone from the company assured us that arrangements could be made for those of us in the audience to see the last 20 minutes of a future performance, but I suspect we won't bother. It's an extraordinarily depressing play, and from what I remember from having read it forty-some years ago, it doesn't get noticeably less depressing any time in the last 20 minutes.

I've never seen anything like this happen in the theater before, although I know things like this do happen from time to time. All I can say to all you actors out there: Be careful!

Comments

[rsc.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of Leonard Warren dying onstage at the Met after singing "O Gioia" in Forza del destino.

I didn't know (or had forgotten) about that one, but I remember hearing that early on in a Met production of Janaček's _The Makropoulos Case_ the singer performing a minor character (I can't remember his name or title), who had climbed a tall ladder onstage to retrieve a document, had a fatal heart attack and fell to the stage. Although there was presumably no connection between the climbing of the ladder and the heart attack, I understand that in subsequent performances they did some restaging to eliminate the use of the ladder.

I can name that tenor in two notes

[(Anonymous)]

I remember hearing that early on in a Met production of Janaček's _The Makropoulos Case_ the singer performing a minor character (I can't remember his name or title), who had climbed a tall ladder onstage to retrieve a document, had a fatal heart attack and fell to the stage.

Richard Versalle.
The character he was playing is called "Vitek," I think.

e-hugs from my new gig, at Penn State -

Xopher