Blood

Getting cut on the head is not as serious as it sounds- or looks. The problem is the high concentration of blood vessels that run around your skull which means even a little nick can bleed like crazy. But just apply constant pressure to the wound for about fifteen minutes, after cleaning away any excess blood, and you should be okay. Okay?

Theater audiences used to scream for blood. We are talking the late fifteen-hundreds here- the Shakespearean era- where the fourth wall was ritually broken and the audience addressed directly pretty often during light hearted moments of the show. It may sound heretical or just plain goofy to how shows are produced today, but the atmosphere was jovial and light, it was the community coming together and having a good time. Besides, it was all a ruse- the last meal before the Execution: when it came time to present the tragedy after the comedy things were all business as the characters audiences had spent the last few hours getting to know as intimately as their best friends and neighbors, were killed off violently. Audiences screamed for blood.

Realistic blood. Human blood, interestingly enough, did not qualify. It congealed too quickly and was considered to be 'too-red' from what people expected blood to look like. Sheep's blood was judged to be the most realistic and was hidden underneath clothing in an animal bladder where it was exploded on cue. These Shakespearean squibs were usually punctured by the other actor's stage weapon which was, usually a real weapon. God knows how many times things went wrong on stage. They sacrificed for their art- make no mistake about it. The biggest sacrifice I had to make was spending eighteen bucks on a cup of hair gel for fixing up my character's hairdo. Of course they can't call it 'gel' any more in the era of trendiness and metrosexuality where salons with one-word names (like Male or Shear or, in this case, Blow) sell gel with one-word names (like Jelly or Wax or, in this case, Pudding [what am I getting a fuckin' hair gel or breakfast?]).

This was all for a production of David Mamet's Speed-The-Plow over at the Dallas Hub Theater that I am acting in. My parents and sister flew in to see a Saturday performance and my cousins in Austin got word of it and decided to come up as well; then my Aunt in Houston figured, since so many people were coming, she should come with her husband and my other little cousin; and since it was now bordering on a family reunion my cousins in California and North Carolina decided to come over too.

A performance is a strange thing. No two show are alike and our small cast was in a habit of playing off of one another, meaning each performance differed slightly from the next, sometimes with not-so-good results. Like, for example, throwing yourself across the stage into a chair and cutting your head open on one of the legs. The choreography involved in our brief fight scene had been practiced many times without incident and I never realized just how tight the set furniture was in the space.

The scene was to proceed as follows: I get punched in the gut, I go to the ground, then my co-star throws me across the stage.

In reality, he puts his hand on my shirt and I kind of throw myself to create the illusion of him throwing me but to give me a certain amount of control. I started rolling on the ground that night and heard a loud crack out of nowhere followed by the pain that went straight to my head. It felt like a pretty good punch, nothing serious, but as soon as I touched it my hand went all goopy and came back red and started dripping all over the stage and I knew I was in trouble.

You hear about disasters occurring onstage all the time- overzealous Othellos getting too much into character and suffocating their Desdemondas for real, people screwing up a cue and skipping ten pages of text, or even, and yes it happens, people breaking the proverbial leg. What you don't often hear about is the million-mile-a-minute dilemma that starts running through every onstage actor's head that asks, “What the fuck do we know?”

The sheer amount of blood that covered my face in such a quick amount of time had me worried that somebody was going to freak out and call the curtain early- me, or the other actor onstage, or the audience which held my parents. Somewhere in the million-mile-a-minute dialog I remembered a few more important things that brought a modicum of peace like:

This was a play, which was important because it came at a critical time in the show when, for all anyone knew, I was supposed to pretend-cut-my-head-open on the stage.

Also that there were only five minutes left before the whole thing was going to be over and if we could just keep moving everything would be all right.

Right? The problem was, I was losing a lot of blood fast. I wondered if I would feel it collecting on my eyebrows before it plunged into my eyes and blinded me onstage and put the kibosh on everything when I stood up to continue the scene and noticed, that by some miracle that it had stopped.

I realized later on, that I was saved by Pudding. My 'Hair Pudding' from 'Blow', it turns out, melted when the blood hit it, dripped down onto the cut that was precariously located under my hairline and congealed over the cut, acting as a temporary bandage, stopping the bloodflow. I signaled to my man onstage to keep going while staying in character and we got to acting.

The blood changed everything. A lot of time in acting the best performance you give is at the audition, the cold reading, where the uncertainty and blank canvas of the arena brings about an innovation and freshness to the performance that you spend the rest of your time in rehearsal trying to recapture. The blood wiped the slate clean and in that instant nothing we had practiced or choreographed mattered anymore. The passivity and fear I had in me normally was replaced with the hatred and violence, and the other actor's normal anger was now intermixed with the fear of a man who may have gone too far.

The play developed a fear and darkness that enveloped the theater. It was the kind of performance neither one of us would never give again (and of course, no one with a video camera). If acting in this sort of modernist theater is the approximation of reality, there was a reality to this situation that couldn't be questioned. When all was said and done and, in typical Mamet style, no happy-ending had been achieved, and nothing had been learned, we came out for the curtain call to little applause. The atmosphere was too disturbing for too much celebration after all.

We went backstage where the crew and cast were waiting to make sure I was okay, which I was. I demanded everyone tell the audience, if they asked, that the blood was fake and the entire thing was staged and part of the play. There was no way I wanted to destroy anyone's illusion of the performance we had just given; also, I probably didn't want to squander my small serendipitous blood sacrifice.

It turns out it was unnecessary- everybody enjoyed the show. They did have one complaint though- they thought the blood we used looked fake. It was “too red”.