Lary Bloom
Writer, Editor, Teacher
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Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Bloch Party
As I was saying about Scotty Bloch....Last night's reading of my new play, Worth Avenue, drew 185 people -- seven more than capacity at the Chester Meeting House, but please don't mention this to the fire marshal. All went swimmingly until Act 5, when, in the middle of Scotty Bloch's intense monologue about widows in Miami Beach (and the fifth and last role she played during the evening), one of the standees collapsed and banged her on the floor. Suddenly heads turned from the stage to the back of the auditorium. Two doctors aided the women, and gawkers rushed to see what happened.
What to do about the play? I wondered myself, after returning from the back to my fourth row seat. About 90 seconds had passed since the incident -- I could still hear the doctors asking the women if she was all right. The odd thing was that on stage Scotty Bloch had just revealed in her monologue (playing a homeless woman named Clara) that dozens of people had passed her by on the sidewalk when she collapsed until one man paid attention to her and rescued her. So some people in the audience actually thought the collapse of the woman in the audience was a part of the play.
Scotty, a veteran of nearly 60 years on the stage, stood in her last position as all this happened. What would she do? Would we have to wait for a resolution of the medical question, and then start over again? Would the rest of the evening be canceled? I hated that idea. But you see the irony -- a play about a woman in the gutter in which the point is nobody cares about her, and here I am, the playwright, sitting in the fourth row wishing the woman who collapsed would be less of a problem (actually, she wasn't injured seriously, though she had to be taken to the clinic just to check her out).
After 90 seconds or so, Scotty, to my surprise and delight (and a little of worry, because I wasn't sure how it would come off) picked up in the script where she left off. Heads turned back to the stage. As it happened, and you can't make this kind of stuff up, her first line was, "Maybe you should ask for your money back." This seemed to lighten the mood, and within seconds the audience was back into the play.
All ended well. At curtain calls, the whole cast was rewarded by a standing audience, but Scotty was singled out for her marathon performance and for her show-must-go-on attitude.
I figured she must have faced such a thing in her six decade career before. But no, she told me. Never before. What are the odds that you'd put on a reading of your play for just one night and in the middle of a monologue about collapsing an audience member would collapse? Ah, the joys of show biz.
Posted by:Lary Bloom at 7:19 AM
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