Plumbing the depths for art
My good friend, actor-playwright-director Trey Nichols, is written up in this week’s LA Weekly, in a special issue devoted to the perils and pitfalls of doing theatre in LA. I’m always happy to see talented colleagues get noticed, although perhaps not in this light:
Employee of the Month
In the summer of 1996 at Moving Arts’ Silver Lake venue, playwright Trey Nichols was on the frontlines, by himself, in his first assignment as box-office/house manager. The audience was due to start arriving in minutes. After using the theater’s one lobby toilet, Nichols observed to his dismay that a blockage by his own fecal matter threatened an immediate overflow after a weak flush. With little time for rumination, Nichols was faced with one of two difficult choices: to walk away and deny all knowledge of what he had done, or to take corrective action. This was just between Nichols and his conscience. Our protagonist explains what happened next:“I grabbed a big handful of my own excrement to clear the blockage. I had seconds to act, and it was the only thing I could do. The performance proceeded without a hitch, though I didn’t shake any hands that night.”
Nichols has been too modest to speak of his heroism until now. If the Weekly had been aware of his actions in 1996, he surely would have received one of this publication’s Special Recognition awards. The play, by the way, was a work by Nat Colley, aptly named A Sensitive Man.
When something similar happened to me once with our theatre’s notoriously weak plumbing, I… used the plunger.
April 9th, 2007 at 7:01 am
Well, that would certainly be right up there with my fondest wishes, to be written up by the Weekly for my forthright handling of crap.
And, as I recall from the Christmas season themed play that Trey wrote – sorry, I can’t recall its title just now – handling crap is a large part of his day gig.
The near poverty of so many of our small theaters is, I think, part of what keeps significant audience away. Certainly, as an actor who has done a lot of plays in small theater venues, I grew very tired of the poverty of the environments. Plumbing, space, discomfort. All this and no money, too. Gosh, let’s all go into showbiz.
Not blaming the theaters of theater companies for their poverty, just lamenting it.