life imitates art
We wanted to take our adult children and their spouses to Coronado for the opening night of my husband’s theatrical adaptation of Jane Eyre. We made our plans back in the spring when the dates were first announced. We then made reservations at the Hotel del Coronado. Arrangements all set. Except that the date that I thought was opening night was really a preview…you might call it a “soft opening,” sending up a trial balloon to test the reactions of an audience before the press reviews the play. But the show was not yet in shape for any audience, so we would have to watch a dress rehearsal instead. All fine, as my children grew up going to TV tapings and love seeing behind the scenes.
But now it gets weird. The Hotel del is a grand Victorian beachfront resort. It’s the second largest wooden structure in the US, a National Historic Landmark. As we checked into our room, we noticed that the room number next to the door was not forged out of metal like all the others. Instead, it was written in Sharpie. Odd. And all day and evening, little groups of people would come by giggling and taking photos next to our door. We later learned that our room was the one where a woman known as Kate Morgan had stayed right before shooting herself in 1892. Supposedly she still haunts the place. We had no supernatural occurrences, but it seemed like a fitting accommodation for us to reside in before seeing Jane: A Ghost Story.
We came back two more weekends with friends to see the show, staying at another hotel. When we recounted the steady improvement in the performances to our children, they all thought it would be fun to see it again on the closing weekend. So, we made reservations to go back to the Hotel del Coronado, being very specific that we did not want to be in Kate’s room again, not because of any fear of ghosts, but because it was situated over the loading docks. The hotel was happy to oblige and offered us a room with a partial ocean view.
Imagine our reaction upon going to the fifth floor and opening the door to see stairs winding up to another floor above. We were in the only room on the sixth floor in the turret of the grand hotel. We almost laughed out loud, as one of the major plot points of Jane is the mysterious woman that Rochester keeps in the attic. It seemed like life imitating art, from beginning to end. At least the hotel didn’t burn down as Thornfield Hall did in the novel.
There have been many twists and turns over the eight weeks of Jane’s run: cancelled performances and substitutions for sickness among the cast. If we didn’t know better we would suspect that it was a contender with “the Scottish play”* for most jinxed production.
Love, Liz
*For those non-theatre types, that play would be Macbeth. It is traditionally bad luck to say the name of the play outloud in a theatre.
Photos by Liz and Kimberly McFadzean
