‘Is this the night?’

“You’ll never know what it’s like to go out on a stage and wonder, ‘Is this the night?’

I love that line. It’s one of several hundred I get to deliver in a production of “A Personal Appearance,” a one-act play by Donald Steele. This week, I’ll deliver it to an audience of community theater people in Ephrata, PA as part of the Eastern States Theatre Association Festival. This Sullivan County Dramatic Workshop production won the Theatre Association of New York State competition last year, and we were moved up to “ESTA,” as it is called in community theater circles.

Think of it as a 4H show for thespians. You put your best sow forward and hope for blue ribbons all around.

“Is this the night?” is the question I pose as Elyse Edelman, the retired, but not retiring, opera diva, as she explains the instability of a performer’s career to her estranged son, David. Elyse has lived with the fear of falling on her face in front of a crowded audience of fans for years. In Elyse’s case, this has never happened. I doubt her character would ever let it happen. She is too accomplished, too talented, too proud. What she doesn’t realize, is too self-involved to recognize, is that everyone who does anything they care about has that same feeling from time to time.

When I sit down to write a column, especially one that is past deadline, I sometimes wonder, “Is this the one?” The one that doesn’t roll off my pen like melted butter. The one that stutters and fails?

As a performer, it’s good to have those references ready. It’s the stuff that fills your character with life. Every real-life failure, loss or near-miss becomes fodder for a future role.

My son is taking an acting course at The New School this semester. He tests his monologues on us, at home. In one, he plays a young man interviewing to be a CIA recruit. He’s supposed to get angry as he tells the recruiter about a boyhood buddy who didn’t make it off the streets of South Boston.

I asked him who he has in mind when he talks about his friend. He realized he didn’t really picture anyone. The next time he did his monologue, a childhood friend was in his thoughts and the performance became “real.”

It’s fun for me to see my children enjoying the craft I studied as a young woman, and am enjoying again now. My daughter is rehearsing for her high school’s musical, “Blood Brothers,” that will open later this month. In it, she plays a woman who ages 20 years and has eight children in the space of two hours, real time. And, she has to sing and dance, too.

The play is more melodrama than drama, she tells me. At one point, she has to give up one of her twin sons for adoption, and she is asked to choose which one. Callison, the 16-year-old actress, is hard put to identify with this dilemma in real life. But when I tell her to imagine choosing between her own blood brothers, tears well up. She will think of them when the time comes to deliver her lines, and the feeling will be there.

In my daughter’s play, things don’t end well for her character. An age-old superstition, that twins who are separated at birth will die if they discover their true relationship, is played out. No one lives happily ever after.

But in the one-act we will present at ESTA, mother and son are reconciled because they are able to connect with each other’s real feelings, for the first time in their lives. They see how similar their lives really are.

When I go out onstage, it’s that feeling of connecting with people that fuels me. It’s also what I love about watching live theater. That, and the excitement of wondering, “Is this the night?”

At ESTA, we hope it will be the night everything works out just fine, with blue ribbons all around.