Nightmare

Posted February 29th, 2004 by Sean Williams

I had the actor’s nightmare last night, but it wasn’t a show. It was my wedding.

One of my many gifts as an actor is that I have virtually no stage fright. I’m sure that can change in an instant, the way I have gone from someone who slept through take-off and landing to someone that can’t watch the Discovery Wings channel because the sight of airplanes makes me panic. But as it stands right now, I never have any fear of performance.

I do get nervous in rehearsal, and I am petrified at auditions, although I’m getting better at both. But the reason I get so scared is because I am unprepared. For a performance, we’ve either rehearsed enough or we haven’t, but either way we’re gonna go out and do it and I have complete faith that I am doing it always as well as I possibly can.

The “Actor’s Nightmare” is that you are on stage and you don’t know your lines. Pretty basic, but harrowing, and it usually includes, at least for me, someone who hates me chasing me around and yelling at me to get on stage.

I have the nightmare, like almost all actors, in place of actually being on stage and not knowing my lines. We have to imagine the worst thing that can happen or we won’t be able to do the thing that a majority of the people are most scared of in the world, which is public speaking.

It’s true. People are more scared of speaking in public than of death, which leads to the obvious joke that if you have to be at a funeral, you’d rather be the corpse than the eulogizer.

In any case, I was at my wedding to Jordana last night, and everything was falling apart. No-one knew what they were doing, the only person there was Seth and then a group of guys I didn’t know, all in matching tuxes, Steve was gone, none of my family was there, and everyone was already hitting the buffet. Strangely, it was taking place in a hotel where I worked as a busboy, in my real life, in upstate New York eight years ago. How I came to work as a busboy eight years ago in upstate New York is anyone’s guess.

Anyway, the nightmare is there to let you know, you aren’t prepared. Fortunately, this show we’re doing closes tonight, so all I have to worry about is the continued hopeful success of Lucretia and making sure my wedding is fun.