The Trojan Women was the last play presented that year as well as the final play most of the cast ever appeared in at Wesleyan. It was not directed by Mr. Russell. I played Andromache, the mother of a small boy who is thrown off a high wall to his death. It is of course a tragic scene especially when the boy's dead body is brought onto the stage. We were fortunate enough to find a little boy to play my son and it was heart wrenching when he is dragged away from his mother.
Our director for unfathomable reasons decided not to use the actual small boy playing dead. Instead the crew built a wooden boy who when it was finally finished looked like a......
wooden boy.
Now in my experience most people can tell the difference between a flesh and blood child and a little wooden boy. When Hecuba stroked his cold dead face, she would get splinters in her fingers. No one could get though this scene in rehearsals without laughing. And then came opening night.
My parents decided to drive up to Macon with my little brother, Jim, to see this play. I now realize they probably wanted to tell me that they were separating, but when it came right down to it, they never said a thing. And there they were in the audience watching a Greek tragedy by Euripides with my eight-year-old brother. Now my parents had seen musicals like South Pacific at the community theater (they had to; I was in it.) While there was a Greek chorus in our little tragedy, no one sang "There Is Nothing Like A Dame." And no laughs whatsoever. Except for the little wooden dead boy.
The little wooden dead boy looked like Pinochio without the long nose. He was borne in on a stretcher and laid before the kneeling Hecuba who had an interminable speech about "thy cheeks like roses" and "thy tiny (wooden) hands." A low murmur rose from the audience; gasps of helpless laughter were quickly stifled and finally during a brief moment of quiet, my exhausted baby brother's head fell back and a deafening, protracted snore was heard throughout the land.
Priceless.
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