"Oleanna" Day 4: Closing Night and Cast Party

8th of December

For our final performance, David and I both felt really good.

We mainly hung out together in my dressing room, going over bits and keeping each other sane.

And we thought it would be cool to do a tour around the theatre:

The music you hear is from “Greatest Love Hits” (or something of that nature): basically the only CD we found in the light booth.

This was the night we sold out…and it was by far our best performance.

Like I anticipated, David and I were in tears during the bow. Backstage we opened up a bottle of champagne…which then spurted on my face when I took a sip cuz we didn’t have any glasses. You know it’s a good night when you have tears and champagne on your face.

There wasn’t a lot of time to bask in the celebration cuz we had to move out all the props and set immediately.

But people responded very well: they said they were captivated and the debates over which character was in the right continued- which is exactly what we wanted. People who I didn’t even know came up to me and told me how much they liked it which was really nice.

Cast party at David’s was cast-plus-friends party (cuz one with just the four of us would be more of a gathering).

I met and chatted with more people who saw the play. Everything was hunky dory until David announced that he was off to bed. This opened the flood gates for me. It had finally sunk in that the party and therefore the play was completely over. Poor James consoled me and just when I was about to get a hold of myself I’d start crying again. Basically: I was a mess.

The next day David participated in the 48 hour pantomime that WatchThis put on so he had something to distract him from the show-closing blues. I finally got distracted with the practical assessment exams that came up on Monday as well as the two papers I had to write by the end of the week.

Seeing the pantomime was a good distraction as well. David made quite the transition from (as his friend Steph put it) “the sublime to the utter ridiculous”.

More on this in a later blog.