Playing Napoleon Bonaparte in George Bernard Shaw’s “The Man of Destiny” at the Peterborough Players Friday night, Tom Frey turned to his leading lady Bridget Beirne and demanded, “I want those dispatches.”
The theatrical moment crescendoed with a loud crash of thunder from the storm taking place outside, which drew a huge laugh from the audience.
“It was all around us. The very bright flash followed immediately by a very loud clap of thunder. It was right on top of us,” said Keith Stevens, managing director of the Peterborough Players. “We all heard it.”
Stevens said it appears lightning hit a tree near the costume shop, which is a shack behind the theater, and traveled through the tree into the ground.“Mirrors got blow off the wall, outlets got blown out,” Stevens said of the costume shop.
“Lightning can get into houses by anything connected to the outside world,” Peterborough Fire Chief Ed Walker said Monday. “It can travel into the ground. … All the wiring between those cabins are underground so when it hits it can head underground and do all kinds of damage.
“Things were blow off the walls. There were a couple of holes that were blow out in the walls that are tarped over for right now,” Stevens said.
Second Company members who play extras in the play, Katie Shults and Richie Dupkin, said they were in the greenroom backstage, which is just a few feet from the costume shop, when it hit.
“It was thundering the whole time, but with that specific lightning bolt we jumped out of our seats,” Dupkin said. “And then we ran into the dressing room and a picture frame fell off the wall.”
“We screamed and ran away like little children,” Shults said.
Crew in the sound booth smelled fire. “It smelt like fire. We smelled it in the booth,” said stage manager Julia Perez, who sent an apprentice to search for what might be on fire, but no fire was found.
Actors still on stage during the first act had to contend with sparking stage lights.
“There were lights sparking too,” Shults said. “Bridget and Tom, when they were on stage, they saw lights sparking and they were like ‘yikes.’”
“At intermission, Bridget was like, ‘There is a light sizzling above me and I can here it sparking,’” Dupkin said.
The Players carried on, however, despite the sparking and sizzling.
“It was just kind of a cascading series of electrical failures that happened after that,” Stevens said. “One of the things that happened was the control system for the stage lighting went down so the second act we did the show with work lights pointed toward the stage.”
The Players also lost phone and internet and on Saturday morning realized the water pump motor serving the staff and actors cabins had burned out in the lightning strike and had to be replaced and that the pump serving the theater building had tripped and shut off and needed to be reset.
By Sunday most of the electronic failures had been fixed, Stevens said. “It was a lot of people pulling together to get everything up and running and functioning.”
Meghan Pierce is digital editor for the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript. You can reach her at mpierce@ledgertranscript.com or follow her on twitter @monadnockbeat.