One winter in the early 1980s, the Empty Space Theatre was running a production of Tartuffe when one of the actors bailed to be in a movie. “Midrun and he was gone in two days,” said Carl Sander, a longtime theater artist who now works at the Burke Museum. Losing an actor to another gig can be a producer’s nightmare.
Not this time. “Nobody batted an eye,” Sander said. “Everybody was jazzed.”
The actor was Kyle MacLachlan, who’d just been raptured out of Seattle theater to star in David Lynch’s Dune and begin his celebrated film career.
That may be one of the happier bailing stories I’ve heard over the years. Normally, unless there’s a budget for understudies, an actor bailing in the middle of a show leaves a theater with two tough options: cancel performances and refund tickets, which hurts an already-hurting theater, or scrounge up a replacement, which can hurt the other artists who have to sacrifice time they’d set aside for other work or family to dive back into the rehearsal hall with the newcomer.…
