"Something is desperate": Theatrical mishaps and embarrassing moments with Shakespeare

At St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, in the beautiful but lively Forest Park, we have to embrace the random sounds of the park. One night during a production of Antony and Cleopatra, a staff member recalls the distinct music of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” from a nearby wedding at the exact time Cleopatra lay dying on stage.

I was a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when I was nine years old. I had this beautiful little purple dress that our parents helped sew together… And my first time onstage, I farted! And everyone heard it. The audience heard it. There was no way of hiding it.

“Lilli [Hokama, who played Hermia] in Folger’s Midsummer… the back of her dress came undone while we were dancing at the end. I was trying to fix it for her, so we both kind of looked like we were grinding up on each other… I was trying to fix her dress!”

I was a first-year MFA at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and my first performance on the mainstage was as Young Siward in Macbeth. I had a truly grisly death where Macbeth took my sword away and simultaneously gutted me with his hand axe while slitting my throat with my own sword. Opening night came, and I charge up the vom wearing 25 pounds of chainmail, sword drawn, really feeling like I had arrived. Greg Thornton, playing the title role, looks over at me, and waits for me to say my first line… which has totally disappeared from my brain.  I see Greg’s expression change from “Who is this little English solider who thinks he can defeat me” to “Who is this student who is taking an acting moment” to “Are we EVER going to be able to continue?” My whole body breaks out in sweat, and I am mortified. In what was probably five seconds but seemed an eternity, “What is thy name?” finally comes out of my mouth and Greg rolls his eyes before saying, “Thou’lt be afraid to hear it.” He kills me with a little extra relish that night, and I am so happy to get to collapse on the floor dead until the lights change and I crawl offstage with my metaphorical tail between my actual legs.

It was the early days of the pandemic and virtual theatre, and we were doing a staged reading of The Tempest. The cast was mostly memorized, but had the script pulled up on their computers. The actor playing Antonio accidentally closed their script document in the midst of convincing Sebastian he should be King. He is such a seasoned pro that he was able to improvise Shakespeare—iambic pentameter and all—until he was able to find his script again. No one watching would have even noticed, but we all still laugh about it!

We were doing a production of Macbeth in 1993. The actor playing Macbeth came on stage with the murderers. The costume the actor playing Macbeth was wearing was a long robe That went down to the floor and a little bit beyond. He’s pacing the stage and trailing along behind him, stuck to the hem of the back of the robe is a coat hanger. The actors playing the murderers, noticed it, and one of them, put their foot out and stop the coat hanger from flapping around before the audience found out.

One night during As You Like It, during the scene where Rosalind (dressed as Ganymede) marries Orlando, an audience member stood up and said that she wanted to marry Orlando. So, Rosalind [played by Dani Heard] says “Oh, friend. That’s going to be a problem.” But the audience member didn’t sit down for a minute. Dani tried to bargain with “Can I marry him first?” But the woman offered to arm wrestle Dani for him.

Eventually Orlando just picked the scene back up. The woman tried to interrupt the show later and the actor playing Touchstone said, “Sit down!” The woman sat down in the middle of the aisle. The patron shoved $100 into Dani’s hand in the lobby after the show. It was bonkers.

I was in a production of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. Three actors attempt to tell all of Shakespeare’s plays in 90 minutes, and it obviously goes off the rails, but we never thought we’d get into this particular conundrum. In Act Two we focus on Hamlet, and there’s an audience participation scene where we ask sections of the house to represent Ophelia’s psyche. The scripted gag is to call out one audience member who isn’t enthusiastic and make them do the silly moves and call and response statements “all by yourself.” When the actor spotting and then playfully chastised a young teenager in the audience who was not participating, his mother lightly tapped her son on the knee and responded to the actor, “He’s mute.” The audience, and the actor, were stunned. The actor was immediately apologetic and said he had to pull his foot out of his mouth, and myself and the third performer had no other recourse but to tease our sheepish friend that he was an absolute “monster” for his mistake, and playfully “throw him under the bus.” We were gleefully relentless, and the teenager and his mom had a great laugh at the actor’s mistake and all was well!