What we will do for theatre...
I have been a professional actor for eighteen years. Add to that my college career and high school and the one time I played "Princess Division" in a play about math in the fourth grade and that makes a hell of a long time spent on the stage. Over the years, I've played mostly character roles -- the crazy ones, the broken ones, the funny ones, the ones who look as if they smell like nickels and ribbon candy... The ones you don't have to be "pretty" for. I like those roles. Those roles tend to invite the actors to step pretty far outside themselves for the sake of the play and it's nice to be asked to take a brief vacation from being yourself.
In those long years as an actor, I have only had to have a stage kiss five times. Kissy roles terrify me. Ask me to play a cyclops grandmother and I'll ask you if you'd like a dialect with that and which side you'd like my hump to lean toward, but ask me to kiss another actor and I turn into a puddle of fear and anxiety. "You want me to play a NORMAL woman that other normal human beings find reasonably attractive? And then you want me to KISS them?! Is it too late to go to law school?" Inevitably, around first dress, the director will pause the rehearsal to say to me "Do you think maybe you could put the kiss in SOMETIME BEFORE OPENING NIGHT?!" Once a director stopped rehearsal to tell me that no one was allowed to leave that day until I finally kissed the other actor as indicated by the stage directions. I mumbled something about maybe possibly having a sore throat and there being worse places to be stuck indefinitely until the director just said "Do it right fucking now, Amy." I screwed up my courage and ran (yes, RAN) headlong into the kiss. There was a terrific crash. I lost a contact lens and the other actor got a black eye.
Right now, I'm in the mother of all kissy plays. Sex happens in every single scene and it doesn't make a lot of sense for that sex to happen without at least one kiss as foreplay. Also, my character kind of orders people to kiss her. She is described as "exquisite," as well, which only serves to cause further anxiety. "Exquisite"? Me? Pleasant, yes. A good personality, yes. Witty, yes. But "Exquisite"? No one who has appeared in public with her skirt tucked unknowingly into the back of her pantyhose with as alarming frequency as I have is allowed to be called "exquisite."
We jumped into rehearsals for this play without a lot of discussion prior to the actual rehearsal work, so I didn't get to make my usual excuses for why I couldn't kiss that day and what happened was simply astonishing. My scene partners kissed me and I didn't burst into flame. It just happened. And it was no big deal. Still, that "exquisite" lingered.
And then there was the small matter of the lingerie. I had to change out of a dress, into a nightgown. In another scene, I had to take off a costume to be revealed in a corset. And I had to stay like that for the rest of the play. In my unders in front of strangers in a rehearsal space with a nasty draft. Since the kiss was taken care of, the exposure of my flesh took over the worry centers of my brain and I stalled as long as I could before I finally broke down and did the costume changes tonight. It helped immensely that one of my scene partners gets super-naked naked in the scene, so a nightgown that hits at knee length is positively Amish by comparison. The corset was another matter. There wasn't enough money in the budget or time in the show for me to get to have a corset. I would have to have done a quick change into the corset and there are no such things as quick changes into corsets...at least not with me. I mean, jeez, it takes me fifteen minutes to tie my shoes. So the dilemma was finding something appropriately risque that looked different from the nightgown and could conceivably have been under the costume piece I change out of. Consequently, I appear in a bra and half slip onstage, in front of actual people, and a boy kisses me. If I could tell college freshman theatre major me that this would happen, she would have switched her major to business and I would have a summer home and a boat by now.
But I did it. And I'm alive. And no one lost a contact or got a black eye. Of course, all bets are off once the show opens.
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