According to Plan

The Fates seemed to be working against us all today. When we arrived at the elementary school to prepare for our performance, we learned that they had lost power to the multipurpose room where we were to perform. And so what do we do? Move to Plan B. Who knew that Plan B involved performing in the great outdoors? This performance truly embodied the entire idea of theatre, of just working with what you have. There was no way to change the situation we were in, so we simply had to adapt our performance to the outdoors. This resulted in some logistical issues as our dragon character had to enter from sometimes very distant locations. As one of these dragon actors, I realized very quickly how difficult it would be to hear the actors from such a great distant. As the performance went on, I also learned that fourth and fifth graders no longer have that suspension of disbelief you can usually count on from a younger audience. They were never phased by the abrupt entrances of our dragon, but we could not simply allow the lack of audience response to affect our level of performance. If anything, the rest of the actors and I continued to actively respond to the audience, attempting to involve the audience as much as possible. It was just a tough crowd.