North Pole Tenderfoot. Doug Hall

Чтение книги онлайн.

      The historic Victoria Playhouse was where the story of North Pole Tenderfoot was first told.

      I was preparing to perform North Pole Tenderfoot, a one-man play based on my rookie experience as an Arctic explorer. I had always dreamed of performing a play of my own, but as I stood in the wings I wondered if I was about to fulfill a dream or live out a nightmare. The next hour and a half could be the worst ninety minutes of my life.

      The house was full, for reasons I still don’t understand. In the second or third row in the center sat Charles Mandel, the theater critic from the Guardian, the largest newspaper on Prince Edward Island. He’d written some caustic reviews that summer, even firing shots at the College of Piping and Celtic Performing Arts’ performance of Highland Storm—performed by island youth.

      I worried that he would take my play to task (or to the woodshed). And as the playwright and sole actor, I’d have no one else to blame.

      Though I’d delivered over a thousand talks to business groups and co-hosted national radio and television shows for millions, this felt different. This was ninety minutes, plus intermission, with just the audience and me—performing in my first play since a high school appearance in The Pajama Game, performing the first play I’d ever written.