We did it.  We performed today.

We gathered with an audience of about fifty people in a little box of a theatre (thank God it was one of the only air-conditioned rooms in Armagh) and sat all in a row, staring back at the risers where our compatriots and our critics perched.  Our scripts were in hand, our laptops were hooked up, our voices and bodies were warm and loose.  If we weren’t ready, there was nothing more we could do to fix it now.

At first, I watched with a decent amount of interest, invested but not tied up in the performance.  I did notice that Chris Warman’s comedy wasn’t getting as many laughs as I thought he deserved.  Maybe the audience was still warming to us, or maybe they were still trying to understand our accents.  Or maybe American humor doesn’t translate into Irish humor.  It’s a thought I’ve had before; I’ve known other comedians who’ve had trouble getting their jokes across to a foreign audience.  And if that’s the case here, since I wrote a comedy too . . . I’m in trouble.

The rest of the performances flew by.  My friends fought past their nerves to do their very best, and each story seemed better than the last.  I managed to focus on my part in Siren’s Call with almost no nerves; letting loose and acting for a bit was a nice distraction.

But then at last we came to my play, Cuckoo in the Nest.

“Breathe,” Joan Weber whispered in my ear.

Oh, yeah.  That’s a thing that’s important, right?

For a few minutes, the audience was way too quiet.  Sure, I was getting a lot of chuckling out of Terri, which was nice considering she’d heard all the jokes repeated until they shouldn’t have been funny anymore.  But barely a peep out of the audience.  They do realize I wrote jokes into this part, right?

But slowly, like water seeping through cracks in a dam, laughter started to flow through the risers.  They were laughing at my jokes.  They liked my play.  I could barely control my smile.  And I had to allow myself a fist-pump when the entire audience laughed at the line, “What if I told you the Slurggians were plotting to take over the world by cloning Princess Kate?”  They laughed at my Princess Kate joke.  No one has ever laughed at my Princess Kate joke.  It’s about time I got some validation on that one.

They laughed at nearly all the right places, thanks in part to the wonderful delivery by my actors and some great sound effects and physical acting by Chris Warman.  And at last, there was applause.  True, it was for everyone’s performance, but some of that was for me, and I was okay with that.

At the informal talk-back afterwards, we were all approached by individual members of the audience offering compliments.  Some told me how much they liked the jokes, especially the bit about mandibles and losing lips at the end.  One woman said the play reminded her a bit of Douglas Adams, then went on to say how well I worked in themes about Northern Ireland and relationships between Catholics and Protestants.  And best of all, the head of ieiMedia himself came up to me and said, “That was d–n funny.”

So yes, I’m very happy right now.  And yes, I think I’ve earned the right to gloat a little.  And yes, tomorrow I’ll probably do something incredibly stupid that will bring me back down to earth.  C’est la vie.