Actors, Fan Stay Up 29 Hours With a Good Book

Even in this era of cryptic experimental theater, few productions conclude with the cast congratulating the audience for staying awake. But so ended the Grove Theatre Company’s production of “Trinity” Sunday night, as grateful actors trooped up to shake the hand of Brian Perry, the one man who stayed for the whole show.

All 29 hours’ worth.

“When I go to a movie or something, I hate to see just part,” Perry explained.

Perry, 30, a library clerk from Torrance, thus saved the 50-member cast from the existential dilemma posed by performing a work without an audience.

“At 4 o’clock in the morning I had this great scene where Conor’s father commits suicide,” said actor Eugene Rubenezer, who played more than 20 characters in the non-stop staged reading of the popular, 815-page Leon Uris novel about Ireland’s fight for independence from Great Britain.

“It’s full of drama and passion, and I look out in the audience and there’s no one there but this one guy, half asleep,” Rubenezer said Sunday during a few precious moments off-stage. “And he’s applauding.”

The reading, conceived and produced by actor Wayne C. Watkins, took place in Garden Grove’s Festival Amphitheatre, an outdoor stage graced for this occasion with three flags--those of the Irish Republic, the United Kingdom and the Ulster Protestants--and nearly two dozen stools on which the actors sat as they read their parts into microphones. No props, no sound effects, no deus ex machina to rescue actors who felt Nod calling more loudly than Eire.

“It’s the most minimal form of theater there is,” Watkins said. “The form takes everything away from the actor except himself”--an approach that placed a heavy responsibility on the diverse cast.

One player impressed into service at the last moment was Dewey Douglas, 35, of Tustin, a theater technician who had helped paint the on-stage flags. Douglas, originally from Crystal Springs, Miss., explained his seemingly un-Gaelic accent by saying he hailed from the “South” of Ireland.

The work’s setting presented Douglas with other problems as well, he said. “There are these Irish words, mostly names, and I’ve got no idea how to pronounce them.”

“Some of those names came out really twisted,” agreed author Uris, who attended the opening and closing hours of the performance and read the first several passages of his book. “But that’s small stuff” in a production he termed “beautiful.”

Others in the audience--which numbered as many as 150 for early evening portions of the performance--were equally appreciative, and understanding. One player, reading from a newspaper account contained in the book, stumbled upon a cumbersome British title.

“ ‘Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admir . . . Admir . . . Ad. . . .’ Uh, how do you say it?” the flustered actress asked on stage.

“Admiralty!” shouted members of the audience, and the show went on.

While some participants found their way as they went along, “Trinity” was precision work for impresario Watkins, a founding member of the Grove company. “I calculated my time frame mathematically,” he said. “I went through the book, read a page and timed it.” At two minutes per page, he reckoned that he would have to make 34 pages per hour to stay on schedule.

His calculations were remarkably accurate for such an unwieldy project. Starting at 7 p.m. Saturday, the work concluded at 11:52 p.m. Sunday, less than an hour behind schedule.

And the project went off with no technical hitches, according to the crew. “No actors collapsed. No lights died,” said stage manager Ellen Glatman, summing up the crew’s two greatest fears.

Indeed, the most worrisome matter facing the cast was simply staying awake. Watkins said that more than 100 pots of coffee and a like number of carbohydrate-rich muffins had been consumed during the production.

Asked why it was necessary to perform the work without interruption, Watkins said: “I wanted to challenge people to stay as long as they could.” The one person who was up to that challenge--Perry--said that like the cast, he too had prepared for his part. By going to sleep at progressively later hours through the week, he said, he was able to conserve his rest by waking up as late as possible Saturday. He brought a change of clothes, fruit juice and a pound of cheese to sustain him. A fan of staged readings, he felt it was well worth it.

“I’ve gone to readings before, but the longest one was an all-day thing,” he said, recalling a program of works by August Strindberg. “It was only eight or 10 hours. This,” he noted in contrast, “was incredible.”