FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| THEATRE Opal's Million Dollar Duck There's no better sign that a couple of actors have achieved a good rapport than when they can't manage to get through a short interview in a coffee shop without cracking each other up. Anne Barrett and Terry Wood, starring in Chimaera Production's Opal's Million Dollar Duck, are a colorful example. Jumping willy-nilly in and out of character, the two try repeatedly to be serious, but every time they make eye contact, they dissolve into convulsive laughter. You pretty much have to separate them to get a straight answer. "You obviously talk to actors a lot and they always tell you they've had a great time doing this play, yadda yadda yadda," Barrett starts out. "We're usually lying through our teeth, because we don't want to tell you about the nights we're at each other's throats. In this instance - right hand up to God - I can't tell you how many nights I've walked into rehearsal and said, 'Can you believe we're having this much fun?' We've walked out of there exhausted from laughing, every single night." Director Erin McLaughlin obviously has a challenge on her hands. "Erin's next-door neighbor has remarked on the fact that she can hear us laughing," Wood adds, and it's not hard to imagine, given Barrett's laugh, an exclamation that has already turned a number of heads in the coffee shop. "It's really hard to play opposite her when she breaks into one of these laughs." In fact, both actors admit that their greatest fear is that they won't be able to make it through a performance without losing control. Despite that fear - or perhaps because of it - they find comedy one of the most rewarding forms of theatre. "It's very easy to make an audience cry," Barrett asserts. "I've been in plays where I can make the whole audience cry on exactly the same word every single night in a drama. But in a comedy, it's a rollercoaster every night, because you can't make those laughs repeat themselves on purpose. The minute you start trying, they go! It's the biggest challenge and I would do it over anything else." Barrett plays the Opal of the title, a woman with an "antique junque shop" and a large collection of odd relics. "As she says in the play, she has everything from the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin to a shrunken human head on a stick in her rather interesting three-story Victorian," Barrett says. One of her treasures is a painting of a duck, lost by a local museum, which Opal decides to give as a birthday gift to her best friend Rosie, played by Wood. "(Rosie) has a hot meatball stand on the highway. And she tells fortunes with her hot meatballs," Wood says. "She loves her best friend Opal - I mean she's very important to her - but Rosie's very self-centered." Opal is devoted to her selfish friend nonetheless, and the relationship is the source of a large part of the play's humor. When two actors show up trying to retrieve the painting for the reward money, the play descends into broad farce. Barrett concedes that there is nothing deep about the story. "Some people go to theatre looking for something that makes them think," she says. "Well, I have no problem thinking, but some days I have a real problem finding something that makes me laugh. And that's why I think that comedy is so important." |