Author: Mark Bradford

There’s a old adage in the theatre: Dying is easy, comedy is hard. That’s probably why I remember so clearly my first comic bit. It was in The Imaginary Invalid. I played Louison the youngest daughter of Argan the invalid.

My one scene was rather simple. Argan wants to find out from Louison about the man her older sister is in love with. When Louison won’t tell him, he tries to beat it out of her, but she outsmarts him, by instantly playing dead, until he repents having killed his daughter.

We played this scene by having me run behind a large wooden chair. David Brigham, the actor playing Argan, would strike the back of the chair with his stick well above my head, and then I made a comic scream and played dead.

One day in rehearsal I had an idea, and I shyly approached the director and asked if when David hit the chair, I could throw the small stuffed clown I was carrying up into the air. The director approved, and so night after night I would run behind the chair and when David struck it, the clown would go sailing comically high into the air, and the audience would laugh.

Nine years old and I was already a comedic genius.

Chekhov’s gun is a famous rule of the theatre.

Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.

-Anton Chekhov

A similar rule might be, if there’s a child in a show that isn’t a comedy, they are there to die. Okay maybe not always, in The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, the kid lives but the rest of his family and just about everyone else is dead.

So I died a lot in my early years of acting. The Plough in the Stars by Sean O’Casey was the second show I did with The Upstart Crow, and just like in my very first play, I died. Not only did I die, but a child sized coffin comes on for the last act, and the other characters play poker on it.

The truth is, I didn’t quite fit in the coffin (no I never had to be inside of it, it was nailed shut). It was exactly my height, so with the thickness of the wood, I wouldn’t have fit. We kept that coffin for years. Or rather two members of the company Jim and Geni kept it in their barn. They found it rather amusing when they had guests who saw it, and wondered why a child’s coffin was being stored. We did eventually use the coffin again when we did the show a second time. It didn’t fit that actress either.

My dad [Richard Bell] likes to talk about The Oresteia as a noble failure, as the reason we don’t cut plays, and also point out that my mother costumed him in beads and a mask. I don’t care. It was one of my favorite plays.

It would be easy to think that it was only a favorite because of the spectacle, and it did have that. The masks the costumes. the 18 foot doors. All of that was cool. But actually one of my favorite books as a kid was D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. I read it over and over so I was very well acquainted with the characters in The Oresteia.

In fact, once the play closed, I got a copy of the script from my parents, and had my My Little Ponies act out the show.