Theater Project Stirs Spontaneous Creation

The good vibes continue unabated for hours. Stuart Meltzer is in the dressing room, looking very businesslike, running his people through Juan C. Sanchez's Less than Beautiful. In the corner of the house, practicing Will Cabrera's I Was the Only Lemming on Noah's Ark, Ceci Fernandez is trying to figure out what a lemming sounds like when it cries, and coming up with a stupefyingly cute cross between a hiccup and a squeal. In the back of the theater, Kim St. Leon is watching her crew read through Ricky J. Martinez's Dime Store Novel, and Bechir Sylvain is working on a broad-stroke parody of an Indian accent that's sending Martinez into paroxysms of giggling. He looks totally sleep-deprived, but he's tickled to hear his fresh-off-the-printer words given life by some of SoFla's most beloved actors. Somewhere, Meredith Lasher is trying to midwife Andie Arthur's apocalyptic Dinner at the End of the World. Outside, Andy Quiroga is bouncing back and forth from Adler and Genn, who are cracking themselves up with Ramirez's Star Wars script, to Perez-Ribada and Sherman, who are working on Ramirez's soberer Twenty-Six. Twenty-Six is about a man who has grown to the height of 30 stories overnight, and the sister who comes to visit him.

"Are we feeling competitive? It didn't even occur to me," says Sherman when asked. "I guess I'm naive a little in that sense. I figure we're all equally fucked."

People keep wandering in and out, laughing, checking in on each other. It's unheard of to have so many people from the theater scene together in one place at one time, and the assembled seem to be delighting in the number of familiar faces. It's like a class reunion, if a class reunion involved memorizing 15 pages of dialogue in less time than it takes most people to read 15 pages.

Even though the writers went home last night, almost everyone else kept the party going for as long as possible. Many got home well after 1 a.m. and slept only three or four hours before returning to Coral Gables at 7:30. By midafternoon, much of the adrenaline has gone out of them. Out front, Deborah Sherman is looking fidgety and drawn. On a nearby stairwell, Carlos Alayeto, Arnaldo Carmoze, and Michaela Cronan are preparing for doomsday (their costar, Erik Fabregat, is MIA for the moment). They're looking as tired as everybody should have felt hours ago, trying to learn the lines of the talky minidrama Dinner at the End of the World. In it the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have a last meal at Denny's before destroying the planet. Famine, played by Carmouze, is trying to make a point about Casablanca. Pestilence, played by Carlos Alayeto, is having none of it.

"Any conversation not having to do with the end of the world needs to end now!" he screams. "All I'm saying is that the problems of two demonic angels don't amount to a hill of beans!" Michaela Cronan, fresh from the similarly themed End Days at Florida Stage, is looking especially harried. She misses a cue. "Is that me?" she asks, looking up from her script. "Shit."

If Amadeo had to bet, he'd anticipate the first stressed-out diva meltdown arriving in two or three hours. "You're already starting to see little tiny cracks. People are getting tired; people are getting anxious about how they're going to learn their lines — that kind of thing."

But he insists it's unimportant. "That sort of all dies down as the show is coming. It's like, 'Fuck it! Let's go!'"

It hasn't happened yet, though. The finishing touches are being added to How My Sister, Sally, Collected Her Winnings Despite the Dead Mime in Her Car. The mime is onstage, angry as hell. "Yeah, I'm fucking her!" he yells. "Mime fucking! Fuck you!"

Actor Todd Allen Durkin creeps backstage, horrified at his inability to nail his lines. "Oh, man," he whispers, "this is gonna be fucking bad. It's like sketch night at GableStage."

The place gets quiet as the audience assembles outside. Amadeo gathers his actors, directors, and writers in the house, and exhorts them to have fun, whatever happens. The sounds of assent are half-hearted in comparison to the gleeful noise the crew was making seven hours ago. And then the doors open.