The rehearsal for God of Carnage, Everyman Rep’s November season opener, began normally enough in the third floor Gentleman’s Room of the Camden Opera House. We had the coffee, we had the clafouti, we had the pretend rum, and our scripts. But after the break, through some sort of mutual unspoken agreement, we moved into improvisation, put the scripts down and just went for it.
The play has its fair share of strong language; it is after all about four adults who move from a civilized conversation into a major conflagration. The improvisation was also strongly-worded. We already know the play very well, we’d done a lot of work on it and the improvisation followed the rest of the play’s development fairly closely.
Fake rum was drunk and it seemed to make us drunk anyway. Phones were smashed, compacts broken – figuratively and metaphorically – and voices were raised.
But it was hot in the Gentleman’s Room, and we’d opened all the windows.
And as the improvisation drew to a close, two cops – one female, one male – quietly entered the room producing a stunned silence and then a unison cry of “We’re just rehearsing.” As again we realized in some sort of mutual unspoken agreement that someone had reported us.
True enough, a couple walking down Elm Street had called to report a “domestic” in the “apartment above the Opera House”.
Of course, the police knew there was no apartment and that this was a rehearsal room among its many other uses so they weren’t there for any other reason except to say that they had checked out the call.
“How’d you get in?” I asked.
“We’ve got the keys to the whole town,” she said, waggling a big bunch.
Then, once we’d explained what we were doing, we got the best compliment we’ve had for a long time:
“Well, you must have been doing a pretty good job at it.”
So, check us out on the blotter. We’ll be there.