Playing Dead

When I was 8 to 10 years old, I used to sneak through the neighborhood around my best friend Ron Cox’s house, tracking my buddies while they stalked me. I think Ron supplied all our toy guns. Each of us hoped to surprise and shoot the others. If someone “got the drop on you” and managed to shoot you (with oral sound effects) before you saw him, you had to play dead until your opponent had had enough time to get away. Then you were up again and hunting prey.

Currently, I’m in a stage production in which I play dead for an entire scene. The show is “City of Angels,” originally a 1989 hit on Broadway with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by David Zippel, and book by Larry Gelbart, famous for everything from “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” to “Tootsie,” “Oh God!” and TV’s “M*A*S*H.” One of the characters I play is a quack healer who is sponging off a disabled millionaire but gets shot in the head in the middle of the first act.

He spends the lengthy final scene of the first act as a stone-dead corpse in the morgue while other characters argue, sing, and dance around him. It’s a somewhat long scene: a fair amount of dialogue bracketed by two different musical numbers go by while I lie motionless on a gurney upstage center. It lasts about nine and a half minutes: I timed it one night.

In most plays, you aren’t dead on stage for very long. Your character gets knifed, shot, or clubbed, and you stagger off. Or you collapse in a heap and get into the wings via one of two ways: either fellow actors drag or carry off your carcass in character, or the lights go out and you sneak off. In this scene, though, I’m dead from lights up to “fade out” (which in fact is the last thing another character says in the scene). Which is not to say I don’t move….

The ideal thing when you’re playing a corpse, of course, is not to be seen breathing on stage. If you’ve been dashing around in a chase or clashing swords, most audience members understand and forgive if the actor’s chest continues to heave after he’s collapsed. For Act I, scene 21 of our production, I have to slip in during the blackout from the previous scene, climb on the gurney, and hang a toe tag over my left big toe just before the other actors cover everything but my feet with a sheet and the lights come up. I consulted the script several weeks into the run, and discovered that according to the official script, my character’s corpse is supposed to get shoved into a morgue locker halfway through the scene, but in our production I stay exposed the whole dang time.

I don’t know how other actors simulate nonexistence. There doesn’t seem to be much choice between either lots of tiny little breaths or very slow, deep ones. There’s a trick (I think -- I haven’t been in a position to see how well this works), where you keep your chest and/or tummy somewhat expanded with your muscles, but breathe in and out “underneath” that distension with what one hopes is minimal physical movement.

Depending on what’s going on around you, though, you can strategize for maximum (non-)effect. For example, any time something significant happens elsewhere on the stage, it’s likely to draw most of the eyes in the audience, and you have a chance to get away with a somewhat deeper breath. A new character’s entrance at the far stage left or right is perfect for this.

In our show, however, the director and choreographer have staged events in such a way that the dead body gets a few other breaks. Other, larger movements, or a live character partially blocking the audience’s clear view of my chest, provide a brief screen for my respiratory activities. Early in the scene, two ensemble members rotate my gurney a quarter-turn as part of a dance move; at another, one sits at the foot of my “bed,” between my feet as the gurney stands perpendicular to much of the audience. Still later in the dance, another character sits at my feet while several others rotate the gurney a turn and a half, I think. All this larger movement or partial blocking of the view gives me opportunities to suck in a little extra air.

On the other hand, there are moments in the scene when much of the audience is likely to be checking out my level of inertness; namely, when other characters are talking about me, or when they’re standing pretty close to the gurney. Since I know when those moments are due, I prepare for them by taking a slow, big breath just beforehand and starting to hold it when they arrive. It’s easier to stay still with a whole new load of fresh air in your lungs. (That's me, below, on the gurney.)

Holding your breath or taking in tiny amounts of air to minimize your movement helps you to understand how much the body’s temperature is controlled by breathing. Because if you get little or no new air inside, your body heats up. When I realized in rehearsals how hot I could get under a long-sleeved sweater, a stately jacket, and a sheet, I found an excuse to take off my shoes and socks for the death scene that occurs several minutes earlier. It’s entirely in character, since this guy’s supposed to be meditating on a ridge overlooking a southern California canyon when he gets shot in the head. But it also helps cool me off later in the morgue scene, a little. Did I mention my character wears a turban? Even in death? My ears get very hot under all that fabric.

So far, I haven’t felt a cough or a sneeze come on while I’m playing a corpse. Those don’t scare me; I’ve held them in before, when I was part of a 120-voice symphonic choir. A stray feather or dust mote tickling my nose could present a challenge, though. The scariest thing so far was last Sunday, when my left foot started to develop a muscle cramp right after I put the toe tag on and lay down for the lights to come up. Will it get worse, I wondered? Should I flex it now before we get too far into the scene? I think I moved my arch and toes a little, just to explore the cramp. Fortunately, it didn’t get any worse.

That got me to thinking about other on-stage emergencies: What does a body -- or even a live, major character -- do if he or she gets an attack of diarrhea in the middle of a play?

A non-actor might ask: Does playing dead make you think about death? In a word, no. You’re too busy concentrating on making the scene work. The same is true of kissing another actor on stage, by the way. People often joke about it, but having kissed a number of women onstage over the years, I can truthfully state that sex or romance is pretty much the last thing I’m thinking about at that moment. You’re working: you’re aware of the audience and you want to make sure the story works for them at that moment as well as prepare for the next move, the next line of dialogue, so losing your concentration in the potential passion of the moment simply isn’t an option.

I have problems with death, but I’ve never given them a thought while pretending to be dead in front of an audience. Metaphysics can’t hold a candle to fears about being seen breathing, or wondering whether that tickle in my nostrils is going to grow into a sneeze.