It’s lovely when you get so many positive comments from audience members after opening weekend. Unfortunately, we didn’t really have enough audience members and we’re desperately trying to encourage friends/family/random strangers to come to our final performances of King O’Neil this week. In a down economy, when most of our audience are our friends, it’s hard to push it because we’re all poor. However, indie theatre often relies on this base and my company, at least, would go under pretty damn quickly if our friends stopped coming to our shows.

In short – we’re keeping our fingers crossed that we’ll still be here to do shows in the future. It’s a great show and we have a blast performing in it – the best example of that being our Sunday night show this past week, where a friend of many of the cast was in the audience. We decided to add in as many references to last year’s production of Romeo & Juliet (that both Eric, our audience member, and 6 or 7 of the cast were in) to try and make him laugh. This worked a little too well, and we ended up in the final scene of the play with the one serious moment being ruined by my love interest unable to speak because he was laughing so hard.

Now, I’ve never corpsed (American translation: broken) on stage before in my life, but we had been amusing ourselves so much throughout the show that when Joe (playing the erstwhile lover of my character) started to go, it spread like a wildfire and soon all but a couple of the strongest cast members were shaking with laughter. I personally was weeping with barely-controlled merriment, and could not make eye contact with anyone on stage for a full five minutes.

The challenge for tomorrow night will be whether or not we all start laughing again when we get to this moment. However, this should be ample encouragement for those of you on the fence about coming to reserve a ticket (or buy in advance – we’re all snazzy with our PayPal on the website) to see what tricks we have up our sleeves for this weekend’s shows.