I harbored no such professional obligations, however, and remained fascinated by the theater’s everyday realities—the costume fittings, understudy rehearsals and union rules that were discussed with delightful matter-of-factness over the dinner table. I was overjoyed to put on my mother’s headset and call a cue once or twice—she’d already called millions—and I readily devoted the occasional Saturday afternoon to helping Dad memorize his lines, an activity that was for me both excellent reading practice and, on more than one occasion, a scarring introduction to French sex farce.

At age six, I finally broke into the biz and got lines of my own to memorize. In the winters of ’85 and ’86, the Asolo’s productions of A Christmas Carol were Wallace family activities. Mom stage-managed, Dad played Bob Cratchit, and my sisters and I took roles like Scrooge’s sister Fan or Belinda Cratchit or any number of Dickensian urchins needed to fill out a scene. We went to work first in the Frankel Building, the old Asolo rehearsal hall that sits, now decrepit, behind the Sarasota/Bradenton Airport. Dress rehearsals and eventually performances brought us to the old Asolo Theater, then located behind the Ringling Museum. Both locales were filled with enough artificial artifacts to stage a history of the world, but thanks to Mom’s No. 1 rule—don’t touch the props—my self-restraint grew as much as my imagination.

While the production kept Mom and Dad preoccupied with their usual work, my sisters and I learned backstage mischief from the pros. Our crowning achievement occurred when the show’s small gang of child actors met just off stage left during a third-act scene that was always awash with dry-ice-generated fog. Just as the lights dimmed, on my oldest sister’s signal, we would exhale in unison, blowing the fog into a rolling, silent tidal wave that enveloped audience members sitting in the first two rows. On occasion we’d accidentally start early, before the lights had gone out entirely. Spotting the gust from her desk on the other side of the stage, my mother knew the cause, and she was not amused.

During curtain calls, the adult actors took their final bows, while upstage, under instructions from the director, we children attacked each other in frenzied, synthetic-snowball fights. Afterward, riding home with the rest of my family down the theater’s long driveway that wound past the museum, I’d stick my head out the car window to dislodge the last particles of plastic snow from my hair.

A Christmas Carol was the peak of my theatrical career. I’d later enjoy a couple of small roles in Conservatory productions, and even a stint as a backstage wardrobe assistant for the two-actor, eight-character The Mystery of Irma Vep (a job that primarily involved helping my father in and out of a big-bosomed French maid’s costume). But I never had any desire to join a school play or be an extra in a movie: I was a professional stage brat, permanently spoiled.

Besides, as nice as it was, I didn’t need the spotlight—and in my family, I didn’t have much of a shot at stealing it, anyway. I could find all the thrills I needed sitting in the darkness amid hundreds of silent people, watching my parents work.

 

At the beginning of human civilization, the world’s first actors told stories around the campfire—so says my father. After years on the stage, the art of storytelling had been perfected by the adults I knew growing up. At dinner parties and barbecues, the old-timers carried on conversations as if moving in and out of an imaginary spotlight. No one stumbled, interrupted or even raised his voice; stories of missed entrances and temperamental actors and malfunctioning props flowed from person to person as though they’d been scripted. And in fact, many of the stories had been told again and again, evolving in different manifestations from the mouths of different people—or the same person, but older—like our own little oral tradition.

I listened to every word and absorbed Asolo history: which actor stole a scene by inventing—and subsequently butchering—an imaginary fly; which one stayed in prim English character to address a restless audience but slipped into her natural Southern accent when she restarted the scene; which one rigged lingerie up his sleeve to give the illusion that he was undressing his costar (Walter Rhodes, Polly Holiday and my father, respectively). Many stories centered on the lengths to which actors will go to alleviate onstage boredom.