Good enough for dinner theatre? For me – that’s a compliment.

On my first day of my first acting class in my first year as a theatre major, the teacher arranged us in a circle on the floor; and, one-by-one, we had to leap to our feet, brandish an imaginary spear, and shout: “I will dare to fail gloriously!” The point is that in the theatre, there is no going back and there is no room for apologies. If you are going to screw up, screw up big.

I have always loved this philosophy because it incorporates the idea that mistakes will happen no matter how much you prepare. The imperfections are as much a part of the music as Jackson Pollock’s cigarette ashes are part of his paintings. Every night, the audience gets a version of the show that will never be done again, because of the hundred little accidents, deviations, and discoveries.

This spontaneity is part of the reason I moved away from acting – I have a hard time with trust and letting go in the moment, and my best idea usually only comes after rumination and calculation. It’s why I’m better as a writer than a performer – I get a chance to think rather than just react.

But even though since college I have rarely sought out opportunities to perform on stage, I have developed this strange pattern over the years of ending up on a stage anyway. It started in high school. A community children’s theatre group I had performed with in the past needed someone to fill in on tech – and on our budget, by “tech” I mean flipping a light switch and operating a CD changer in the back of a cafeteria. So I showed up for one rehearsal, watched the show, and noted all my tasks.

On opening day, at one o’clock, the director called and said: “Hey, I’ve got a crazy idea. Want to act in the play?” One of the cast (and strangely enough, he might be reading this post right now) had twisted his ankle after the last rehearsal and couldn’t perform. The director needed someone who could memorize the part in six hours.

Now this part I do well. I’ve done Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard and I adore words, so I have the skill for recording language in my brain on short-notice. I will freely say I am not all that good an actor, and I’m tricky to cast – I can’t dance, my singing is so-so, I’m too odd-looking for the leading man roles, too tall and soft for the energetic character roles, too cerebral for the boisterous roles, too rubber-faced for serious roles, too unthreatening for the macho roles, and too young for the old crafty roles. But I understand stagecraft and discipline enough that people I work with can trust that they don’t have to start from square one. I can be plugged in on an emergency basis and they won’t have to worry I’m going to crash the show.

It happened again when my sister was helping produce her fiancée’s musical. They needed an extra set of backstage hands and someone who could walk on to do two lines at the end. And with one rehearsal, that’s exactly what I did. Auntie Mame happened a few years later because of my brother. He had kept doing community theatre as an occasional hobby, and when a production needed to fill a supporting role eleven days from opening, a friend of his in the cast dropped his name. He wasn’t available for the whole run, so I got brought along as part of the family package for half of the performances.

After that, when I was directing my 10-minute play for Sacred Fools in LA, and my lead dropped out three days before the show, my good friend Mishka the Hairy Russian, who I had also cast and have known since college, was the one who convinced me that searching for a new actor on such short notice was foolish when we already had a perfectly capable one who knew the script available – by which he meant me.

I auditioned for one play a year or so ago, but didn’t prepare, mumbled my way through it and didn’t have a serious chance at a part. I have never been that good at auditioning and it wasn’t a show for which I was actually appropriate, in hindsight.

But Norma Jean, one of my castmates from Auntie Mame, remembered my ability to swing in at the last minute (and actually has a far higher opinion of my abilities than I do), and on Saturday night she dropped me a Facebook message which is the reason why I haven’t been able to post, or really even think much, since then.

She was working on a murder mystery – basically an EZ-bake farce in the vein of the movie version of Clue that gets booked for corporate events and parties. They are high-energy, super-broad, lowest-common-denominator, usually with ample fourth-wall-breaking and audience interaction, and you end up performing in some strange locations. But the very, very, very, very important thing about these shows is – they pay.

She told me that someone in the cast had fallen very ill, and that they were booked to perform on Wednesday, and while the director had played the part before and could do it again if there were absolutely no alternatives, she was wondering if I wanted to give it a go. The pay part did seal it for me, I admit. I thought it was going to be a small role – a butler or something. You couldn’t expect much more on such short notice.

On Sunday morning she e-mailed me the script for Mobster in the Men’s Room, and then told me which role I was playing. It was the lead – the character who acts as the detective once the murder happens. In the second act, the longest one, I had half the dialogue, as I questioned the other characters. The script was only 45-60 minutes long, but to memorize it by Wednesday? With three different endings which rotated depending on which character committed the murder any given show? Without ever meeting the director or the rest of the cast? With only the van ride to the venue to rehearse together? With never seeing the performance space or having any pre-set blocking?

I knew I couldn’t be sure I was saying yes until I cleared it with work, but the director re-assured me by phone that the ending had already been picked, so I could ignore the other two; that I wouldn’t be involved in the biggest improvisational bit, and that, since I was conducting an interrogation, having a little notepad in my hands during Act Two was totally justified. I proceeded to transcribe all of Act Two into a little notepad.

We convened this morning at 9:30 at the Costa Mesa Playhouse – me with my new haircut, my repaired glasses and my borrowed tie. One of the other co-stars had been in Auntie Mame as well – that made three out of five of us; and we all knew we worked well together. After a little bit of gabble and gossip, we hit the freeway and started running lines, and finished 1½ recitals of the script on the way. I knew I was going to have blank spots; what amazed me (and set me at ease), was that I was not the only one. Apparently this company, which refers to itself as the largest murder mystery company in the country, is well used to the last minute, throw-it-against-the-wall approach.

The venue was a Dave & Buster’s in San Diego, and it was a corporate party for some bank executives. We think they were loan profilers. Everyone wore nametags, and certain ones had stars on them – for some reason, we were instructed to pay these people extra attention. Minutes before curtain, the director pulled me aside to ask if I could locate one particular guest and give him an improvised mock interrogation during act two. Since we were already altering/eliminating lines, and remembering all the pronoun changes caused by one of the male roles being played by a female, I had really been swept by the circumstances into a “bring it on!” mindset; so I said sure.

At that point I had studied all I could study, I had a full night’s sleep and a good breakfast. I had already exercised whatever tiny power over the quality of the show I had, and the rest was up to the Gods. In Ancient Greece, theatre was so revered that two Gods were considered to have it in their province: Apollo and Dionysus. Respectively: The God of Perfection, Light, and Truth; and the God of Liberation, Drink, and Ecstasy. That dichotomy has always been so important to my attitude about theater, because we must strive all we can, and yet give ourselves jubilantly to the moment.

Our “dressing room” was a training room near the kitchen, where prospective employees learn to identify all the glassware. Norma Jean said that it reminded her of her stand-up comedy gigs; being shoved into whatever space was handy before the show. Everyone else got free coffee and sodas – I knew that one thing I didn’t need at all was caffeine.

I don’t think what I felt was actual fear – not in the fight-or-flight school. I felt the delirium of the challenge, as I had been ever since Sunday morning. And I felt a surrender to the fact that this could only be so good in the final analysis. If we got some laughs from the room, and made them feel like we’d given them a novel experience that was worth leaving home, that’s an epic win around here; and for me, just to be doing SOMETHING with my day that isn’t pushing paper is so fulfilling.

That’s not to say my heart wasn’t thudding.

The stage was – well, not much of a stage. Half of it was covered in balloons and a podium, and our instructions were to perform throughout the room; walk around the space, make sure every corner got at least a couple of minutes where they could hear us.

Oh yes – the acoustics. This was like a small banquet room, with a bar setup in the corner, which makes a lot of humming and squirting noises that you don’t notice until you are trying to recite plot information over them. And just on the other side of a pair of swinging doors was the main gaming area, with all the attendant noisy music, cracking of billiards balls, and gunfire from the very latest zombie-shooting arcade machines. And the only microphones were a couple of fixed ones on stage. If we weren’t on stage, we were BELLOWING our lines. No choice but to go big.

Not everyone in the room had exactly signed up to take in some theatre. Most, I’m sure, would have been happy with the free meal. The ones who couldn’t hear us quickly made their own conversations. There was so much clinking of glasses and silverware. Some never stopped texting/talking. Not an ideal room – but, if you know the traditions of live theatre in Western Civilization, there is something very true about it.

Oh, it was chaos, Jimmy. I lost count of the number of dead spaces we had to improvise through. We kept getting trapped in corners by chairs or food servers. Amazingly, I remembered most of my lines, although I did need to go to my notepad twice, and accidentally dumped a page of the show by skipping ahead twice. I even broke the pen I was using to “take notes” during the interrogation.

Before the final scene, the crowd got to vote on who they thought was the killer before I came back out to explain whodunit. And once I did, I noticed that the actor playing the killer had worked his way to the opposite side of the room, so I was sprinting and shouting my re-enactment of the fatal stabbing as I got closer. And only while running at full speed did I realize that a) he was at the bottom of a set of three steps separating the upper and lower dining areas, b) I was running towards him awfully fast, and c) there was no way to stay in character and just stop to walk down them.

Which is how I ended up taking a full-speed, highly-dramatic flying leap, landed in an unbalanced position, and tumbled to the ground – frightening my cast-mates and, I’m sure, thrilling any lawyer in the room.

I sort of rolled into a chair leg, banging my shin and hip and giving my bad knee some major stress. But I hopped right back up and finished the damn play, and it was only a half-hour later, as we ate Subway sandwiches in the van, and with the adrenaline wearing down, that I even noticed I was not totally unscathed. It’s not bad by any means; but I am normally so cautious. I didn’t realize I was capable of such a goofy, risky stunt.

But that is the moment you work your way into. That’s when you are a theatre actor.

This company apparently gets about 50-70 bookings a year. One of the actresses has been doing these shows for twelve years – and said on the way back that this was the best cast she had ever worked with. Maybe she says that every time. Maybe she feels it every time. The rush makes you think and feel a lot of things. What I know is that this was the toughest test I had ever had of my compressed-rehearsal abilities; and while I didn’t do as well performance-wise as I would have liked, I never half-assed the stuff that I did badly.

They’re talking about the idea of me doing more. I still maintain at the top of my lungs that I am not an actor.

But they do pay.