I might be wrong, but I think it was Alan Ayckbourn who said that when he was very young and first going to the theater, he always hoped that something would go wrong, because that would lend any performance an aura of the exciting and unexpected.
Last night, I went to a new Ayckbourn play called Arrivals and Departures at 59E59—part of the theater’s Brits Off Broadway series—and something went wrong. We were about an hour into the first act (the play was scheduled to last over two and a half hours, including a brief intermission), and we in the audience had managed to take in that this play was set in a train station, where the British army was attempting to capture a terrorist by placing a lot of trained “bystanders” around in the waiting area. The officious major in charge of this operation kept having to rehearse his incompetent soldier-actors in their performances as bystanders, so there was a strong play-within-a-play element. Meanwhile, through a series of flashbacks, we were learning a lot about the female soldier Ez Swain (officially named Esmé), played in this production by a very talented actress named Elizabeth Boag.
There had been a lot of background noise of the sort one usually gets at train stations, and we had just reached a rather tense scene involving Ez and her soldier boyfriend Rob (this was in one of the flashbacks), when a beeping ring started sounding. All of us in the audience assumed this was just another train-station sound effect. After about 20 seconds of it, though, Rob turned to the audience and said, “I guess we should stop now.” At first we thought this too was part of the play-within-a-play, but then Ez said, “Yes, I guess we should,” and they turned into themselves (you can actually see actors do this, even when they are still in costume) and shrugged in a discouraged manner.
The house manager of 59E59 came onto the stage and assured us that even though the fire alarm seemed to be going off, there was absolutely no fire and we should just remain in our seats. My companions, however, remembered that similar instructions had been issued to people in their offices on 9/11. Given that the theater was below ground, and that the problem could have been, say, carbon monoxide rather than fire, we decided that the better part of valor was to go up to the lobby, or at least the staircase, and wait there. Many other people used the opportunity to go to the bathroom or check in with their voicemail. In other words, the audience turned this unexpected break into our own little intermission, and we had high hopes of continuing without a further one, once the pesky alarm got silenced.
It took them about fifteen minutes to quiet the damn thing, and we all returned to our seats. But when we got back into the theater, the house manager announced that though the sound was gone, the fire panel that connected the theater to the fire station had completely gone out, so we could not legally continue the play. Everyone, he assured us, would get refunds.
“But,” we asked, “what about the rest of the plot? What happens in the play? Couldn’t you get someone from the company to come out and tell us?” So Elizabeth Boag came out in her street clothes, looking somehow entirely different from Ez even though she had the same hair and build, and told us—in a London accent that was not at all the same as Ez’s—what happened in the rest of the play. About half the audience had stayed to hear this, and we were like avid children being told a tale for the five or ten minutes before bed. When Boag reached the point where she was describing the end of the play, which involved a moment of catharsis between Ez and an old geezer named Barry (performed with consummate skill by Kim Wall), she burst into tears: not acting tears, but real tears that for a moment overwhelmed her speech. You could sense that the tiny audience was very much moved by this, perhaps even more than we would have been by the actual moment of catharsis in the play. It was the kind of theater one always hopes for and rarely gets: unexpected and exciting and real.