FIASCO!

ACT ONE. OPENING NIGHT.

Ira Glass:

We begin our show with this true fable of Peter Pan in Act One, Opening Night.

Jack Hitt:

Opening night comes, and, well, almost everybody in the area, in the 10-mile radius of this theater, knows somebody in this production. So the place is pretty much packed. And I don't know if you remember the opening moment of Peter Pan, but it's the three little kids sleeping in their bed. And Peter Pan comes flying in the window.

And in this particular production, there's a big bed with all the three kids in it. And off to the left, I remember, is a big, huge wardrobe. And there's a large window there, and a little bureau. And Peter Pan comes in and has the little speech where he says, "Anybody can fly. Why, with just a little magic dust, one can fly." And Peter Pan sprinkles this magic dust in the air.

And sure enough, the kids suddenly just lurch into the air. And it becomes clear right away that the people that they've hired to run these flying apparatuses really aren't quite clear on how they actually work. So instead of the kids sailing gracefully to and fro, they hang in the air like puppets,just dangling there and getting jerked up an inch or two or back and forth.

Ira Glass:

And then sometimes they're just stationary?

Jack Hitt:

Yeah. Just hanging there like a spider.

And then several of them start to circumscribe these circles in the air, where it's clear that the people running the machines have just set them off on these oval courses that spiral farther and farther out. And if you're sitting in the audience, there was clearly a sense of fear on the faces of these people.

Ira Glass:

Of the actors?

Jack Hitt:

The actors. The actors actually-- you could sense their lack of confidence, shall we say, in the people running the machines in the back.

Ira Glass:

Wait, wait. And the audience reaction to this point is just-- are they laughing?

Jack Hitt:

No one is laughing. This is one of the great things about audiences, especially in a live theater production, is that they're very forgiving. They want the show to work. And so everyone is gripping their chair a little tightly. We feel for them. They're up there. They're embarrassing themselves for us.

Ira Glass:

We identify with them. We become them.

Jack Hitt:

And so the audience, I think, was very forgiving and very understanding of this moment. But there was one moment in this first opening scene that put the audience on notice. And that's when, as the kids are jerking up and down and swinging back and forth and going around in these ovals, at one point, the littlest one, thelittle boy, is being flung around a little too hard.

Ira Glass:

Well, he has the least mass to resist whatever the machinery is doing to him.

Jack Hitt:

Right.

Ira Glass:

Mm-hm. OK. So, and?

Jack Hitt:

And so he's flying around in this circle. And the audience sees this coming. And there's a real sense of pain and gripping of the chair and white knuckle-ness as the kid suddenly does just an enormous splat into the wardrobe. And it's clear that he's hurt, and he comes off of it a little dazed. Then, of course, he's jerked up in the air a little bit, and often a little too high, so that he's suddenly in the workings. He left the stage itself. He's now up there with the lights. Then, all of a sudden he would just plummet back down to the stage and be caught up just before he hit the floor.

It was hard to watch, because, as you can tell, it's an incredibly funny moment, but like I say, the audience was still in this very forgiving mode. And no one said a word. We just all sat there, holding our breath. And there's that weird tension of being in the audience, thinking, oh, oh my goodness. They have gotten off to a very bad start. Oh, this is not good. And we feel for them.

Ira Glass:

May I just interrupt for just a moment to just say, now at this point-- because after all, we are not just joined here together on the radio, you and I today, to laugh at the foibles of the unfortunate. No, no. We're here to enumerate the qualities of a fiasco. At this point, we are not yet in the territory of fiasco.

Jack Hitt:

No. No, because, like I say, audiences are forgiving. One or two mistakes, even big ones like this, they are going to let that ride.

Ira Glass:

Yes, they are.

Jack Hitt:

We did. We did. We were very good.

Ira Glass:

So we are not yet at fiasco. We are at a normal level of mishap.

Jack Hitt:

Right. What happens immediately after this, they disappear to Never Never Land. And if you remember, the stage goes dark. And then when the lights come up, there's Captain Hook. And he's giving his first opening soliloquy about how evil he is and what a menace he is and how he harms people and hates children. It's all that good stuff.

And so Captain Hook is out there, and he looks great. He's got one of those big, old, fat hats and this great hook and these wild-looking boots and everything.

Ira Glass:

And people are feeling more confident. Something's happening.

Jack Hitt:

It's a good sign. It's a good sign. And he's in charge. This guy, he's got a bad mustache, and he is certainly evil. And the audience is totally in his pocket. He's speaking away and gesturing wildly and going on and on about how bad he is.

And then at a certain point, as he gestures, his hook and the entire black casing up to his elbow flings off of his hand and flies into the audience and punches an old lady in the gut.

Ira Glass:

He is bad.

Jack Hitt:

He is very bad. He had the worst ad lib I've ever heard. I mean, what do you say at that point? Because, of course, his hand is now nakedly exposed to the audience.

Ira Glass:

A tough moment for any actor.

Jack Hitt:

Very, very hard.

Ira Glass:

If the very premise of your character is that you have a hook, your name is Captain Hook, literally all that's going to happen for the rest of the show is people are going to refer to you by that hook. Your entire motivation as a character is the fact that your arm was eaten off by an alligator and that you have to have a hook.

Jack Hitt:

The entire plot stems from that fact.

Ira Glass:

Right. And now, suddenly, you have no hook.

Jack Hitt:

In fact, you have five fingers on a hand.

Ira Glass:

As if a miracle by the Lord.

Jack Hitt:

Captain Hook said, "You know, they just don't make those hooks like they used to." That was actually the ad lib. I will never forget it. Then the lights come up, and we are in Never Never Land.

Ira Glass:

In Act Two.

Jack Hitt:

Yeah, this is Act Two. And Captain Hook might have stood in front of the set, but you didn't really see it, because he spoke from shadow. And now the lights come up. And this is supposed to be a very dramatic moment.

The rumors of all this crew and the painting and everything that was going on and all this construction all worked towards this one moment, because when the lights came up, here was Never Never Land, this sort of psychedelic set. There were papier-mache mushrooms everywhere of different sizes. It was absolutely wonderful and surreal.

And there's nobody there. And then from the upper rafters of stage right, suddenly the kids and Peter Pan appear.

Ira Glass:

Flying.

Jack Hitt:

Flying. They're flying. And their landing occurs rather rapidly, at an angle of about 45 degrees to the stage. They come down basically like, I don't know, lead sinkers on a line, and crash to the floor, and then are just dragged across the floor like mops and wipe out all of the mushrooms.

Ira Glass:

And so now, have we arrived at a turning point in our fiasco?

Jack Hitt:

Yeah. Yeah, it's clear now that the audience is giving way. Something has been lost. Some sense of decorum, that little bit of forgiveness that the audience has for the actors--

Ira Glass:

And empathy.

Jack Hitt:

--and empathy. It's beginning to dissipate. Well, there was a split in the audience. The younger people, who were the least forgiving, they started to go first. OK, so the high school students, a couple of college students, maybe, they started to laugh out loud.

And I'll be honest, Ira, I might have been one of those first people to laugh. I was in the 10th grade. It was hard to not laugh at this thing. But then, whatever restraint that the audience had, it just evaporated at this point, because there were a number of things that happened in quick succession that just made it impossible to hold any sense of decorum.

Ira Glass:

Which are?

Jack Hitt:

For example, Tinker Bell appears for the first time around this moment. And Tinker Bell is essentially a light bulb on an extension cord.

Ira Glass:

What?

Jack Hitt:

Yeah. And this was the director's idea of being raw, being very modern. Tinker Bell was just going to be this literal light bulb, dangling from an extension cord.

Ira Glass:

Whereas, in other productions, what they'll do is that someone will shine a light.

Jack Hitt:

Shine a light, or they'll just--

Ira Glass:

A beam of focused light. And then that pinprick of light is supposed to be Tinker Bell.

Jack Hitt:

That's right, or something like that, or nothing at all, and people just address the invisible sprite. Well, that did not happen in this case. This bulb comes just dangling down and sort of hangs around this naked--

Ira Glass:

A bare light bulb?

Jack Hitt:

--white bulb just hangs around. And people are talking to it. And I think Tinker Bell must have had an appearance in the first act. But it was somewhere in here that people just started laughing at this.

Then another thing that happened was, later on in this scene, if you remember, Wendy gets trapped on an island. And she spots a kite that's flying by. And she's supposed to grab it and attach it to her back and fly off. Well, of course, the kite is attached to the flying apparatus line. And it gets closer and closer to her. She's standing on this little papier-mache hill.

But the flying apparatus people can't quite get it close enough to her to reach. So she has to step out into the waters that she's just told us is filled with crocodiles to grab it. She finally gets the kite, and when she yanks on it, it pops off the flying apparatus. And the hook goes zinging up into the lights and catches.

So now there is this big loop of wire hanging in front of the stage. And there's Wendy, holding the kite. And she ad libbed as best she could, as I remember. She said, "On second thought, maybe I can swim." And with that, she walked off the stage, motioning her arms like you would do the swim, the dance, in 1965.

So she does that. At this point, the actors are just falling apart. They are so frightened of the audience. There are just belly laughs rolling up to the stage from the audience. People are howling with laughter at every mistake.

And now any small mistake just takes on these-- any instigation for laughter is just enough of for this audience. And now the old people have given it up. Everyone has quit being nice. Now there's just this kind of frightening roar that comes from the audience every time there's a mistake.

Ira Glass:

Well, what happened? At some point the audience turned and realized, oh wait. I realize what's going on here. This is a fiasco.

Jack Hitt:

Yeah. This is a fiasco. And what's really interesting about a fiasco is that once it starts to tumble down, the audience wants to push it further along.

Ira Glass:

Oh, they get hungry for more fiasco.

Jack Hitt:

Oh, yeah.

Ira Glass:

If the play proceeded perfectly, they would be disappointed.

Jack Hitt:

Oh, it would have been a grave disappointment had not been just one more mistake after another, one more embarrassment after another. Now the reason they're there is to chronicle these embarrassments. This is why I have remembered this play for 25 years.

Towards Act Three, Ira, the director had decided that she wanted to break down the fourth wall. This was cutting-edge theater, as far as she was concerned.

Ira Glass:

Before you do this, I just want to explain. When we say breaking down the fourth wall, what we mean is the wall between the actors and the audience. Usually it's impermeable, but then there came a point in the late '60s, early '70s, where a lot of theaters-- basically, the actors would come out into the audience.

Jack Hitt:

That's right, and interact with the audience and break down that wall. So the idea being that you would get more in touch with the dramatic sense and the reality of what was happening.

Anyway, so in this particular scene, what was going to happen was that the Indians were going to throw rope ladders down from the balcony and climb down these rope ladders into the audience and move among the audience in their very scary, savage way and frighten us. Anyway, I know about this scene, because my friend David, who I went to high school with, was in it.

So when David was climbing over the top of this balcony to climb down the rope, he lost his footing and fell to the floor from the balcony, a distance of about 15 to 20 feet.

Ira Glass:

Oh my god.

Jack Hitt:

A good fall.

Ira Glass:

That's horrible.

Jack Hitt:

Yeah. And he landed on both of his feet and sprained both of his ankles and, of course, curled into a fetal position and began to cry. He was really, really hurt.

Now, to appreciate the horrible moment I'm now describing, also understand that it's a Friday night. We are in a college town. And there is a volunteer fire and ambulance department. And in order to summon the rescuers from wherever they are, an alarm is sounded that can be heard for five miles. That alarm is located right over this theater.

So the alarm goes off, OK? This is an air raid siren. It is so loud, you can put your fingers in your ear, and it's still hurting your ears. We're right under it. It can be heard for five miles.

And then, of course, three minutes later, busting through the door of the theater are these 15 firemen who are in boots, hats. They've got hoses. They don't know what it is. All they know is that they've been sent out on a call. And to add to the chaos, the director, of course, has flogged the actors that the show must go on.

Ira Glass:

No matter what.

Jack Hitt:

No matter what. So while all of this is happening-- and several people are attending to David. And other people have just now decided that since the firemen are here, he's going to be fine. They can start laughing. And now the audience has just completely lost control.

People are standing up in their seats and shouting for more. They want blood. At this point, people are actually injured in the production. And they want more. Somehow, that's how this entire play ended.

Ira Glass:

What's interesting about that this as a fiasco, I feel like the thing it makes me understand about fiascoes, is that the fiasco itself is an altered state. That is, all the normal rules are off. You have left the normal rules of how the audience is going to interact with the actors.

Jack Hitt:

Right. I've never seen a production like this. And I've never seen an audience collapse like this.

Ira Glass:

See, but I wonder, when you think about what people go to theater for, what kind of release people want, people want an experience that will take them out of themselves. We all want an experience that would take us out of ourselves and into another place in another reality. And it sounds like this production, even though it was a fiasco-- in fact, because it was a fiasco-- was more successful at that than any conventional play could be.

Jack Hitt:

Well, see, I have to disagree with you there. I think the old theater critics, the ancients, would say that the reason you go to the theater and to see a great production is to be, I think the word these used to use is "transported." The idea being that you would be lifted away from your animal nature and into these higher, more spiritual realms, or get in touch with these greater, tragic emotions, right? But of course, what happened here was the exact opposite. We got transported directly in touch with our animal being.

Ira Glass:

Our baser selves.

Jack Hitt:

Right. But that's almost as rare, if not more so, than a great production.

Ira Glass:

Jack Hitt. He normally writes for The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker.