Corpsing IS BRITISH THEATRICAL SLANG for unintentionally breaking character by laughing. The origin of the term has never been nailed down, but it most likely arose from a laughing fit by an actor portraying a corpse. Another, far more literal interpretation of corpsing would be to actually become a corpse onstage, by dying. This has happened many times in many venues over the years. If there’s a stage on which to act, there’s a public platform on which to drop dead.
Some onstage deaths are more obvious than others. The seventeenth-century French actor and playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known to the world as Molière, was fifty-one and suffering from tuberculosis on February 17, 1673, when he performed in the title role in his play Le malade imaginaire (“The Hypochondriac”) for King Louis XIV at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris. Already so ill that he was forced to perform while sitting in a red velvet chair, he was seized by a violent coughing fit and began hemorrhaging from the mouth. “Don’t be alarmed! I am not dead!” Molière announced, insisting on going on with the show before he collapsed after an even more copious hemorrhage. They carried him offstage in his red velvet chair. No hypochondriac, he was indeed dead within a few hours.
Then there was Emil Hasda, the comedic actor who in 1904 starred in a Berlin touring company production of Ludwig Fulda’s play The Twin Sister. When the show opened at the Municipal Theatre in Nimptsh, Poland, on March 24, he had the crowd roaring with laughter through the first act and received half a dozen curtain calls. On the sixth, he drew a revolver from his hip pocket, placed it to his temple, and, in front of the entire audience, pulled the trigger and blew out his brains. One wire service reported that “when the blood was seen to flow, women fainted and men fought their way to the stage to get a glimpse at the suicide.” Apparently one of the actresses had rejected his proposal of marriage. (If Hasda’s suicide seems an overreaction, consider Ludwig Heinle. On October 26, 1926, the actor ran onstage and stabbed himself to death with a dagger during a performance of Peer Gynt at the Municipal Theatre in Strasbourg, France. He was upset that the stage manager gave him a hard time for showing up late!)
Despite such histrionics, the most memorable deaths onstage are ones in which an actor recites a line and then takes his or her leave from the stage and mortal coil, as if on cue. The “exit line” often serves as all-too-perfect set-up for the ultimate punchline. Most of the time, the audience thinks it’s part of the show.
After three weeks of rehearsals in Los Angeles, Homer Curran’s road production of Golden Boy rolled north in March 1938 for two tryout performances at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara. The show, starring Francis Lederer, would be a hot ticket. Clifford Odets’s acclaimed play about violinist-turned-prizefighter Joe Bonaparte was a smash hit on Broadway and still running at the Belasco Theatre on West Forty-Fourth Street, where it had opened the previous November with Luther Adler in the title role and Frances Farmer as his love interest.
The only omen of any potential problems was that the first road performance was scheduled for April Fools’ Day. Twenty-one-year-old future movie star Glenn Ford had the job as stage manager (and two lines in the third act: “Knockout!” and “Lombardo’s stiff ”). “Actors are a very superstitious breed,” he told his son Peter, as noted in the latter’s biography, Glenn Ford: A Life, “so there was already some feeling of uneasiness among some in the cast. The curtain went up and everything went smoothly, until we got to the second scene.”
In the second scene of the first act, Joe’s father, Mr. Bonaparte, shows off the expensive violin he plans to give his son the next day for his twenty-first birthday. “The actor playing the boxer’s immigrant father in the play, Joe Greenwald, said his line—‘A good life ah, is, ah, possible . . .’—and suddenly collapsed dead of a heart attack,” Ford remembered. “I rushed onto the stage immediately. He was lying in the arms of one of the other actors.” The trade journal Variety reported a different line in the Golden Boy script as the sixty-year-old actor’s final words: “He had just concluded his line, ‘This is the moment for which I have waited,’ when he collapsed.” The New York Times offered its own version: “Mr. Greenwald had just uttered the opening lines of a speech, ‘All my life . . .’ when he crumpled to the floor.” So there’s some confusion:
A good life ah, is, ah, possible . . .
This is the moment for which I have waited . . .
All my life . . .
Any of those reported last words would suffice, as Joseph Greenwald’s body lay motionless and Sam White, the only other actor on the stage at the time, called frantically for the curtain. The curtain was dropped, the capacity audience was eventually dismissed, and everyone got refunds. The Santa Barbara Fire Department’s pulmotor squad tried to revive Greenwald, to no avail. “He was already dead,” Glenn Ford said. “God, what an experience.”
There was no understudy for Joe Greenwald, so the show was shut down for a week until a replacement was found. The producers brought in Lee J. Cobb, from the original Broadway production.
Edith Webster died onstage every night. For eight years, she’d played the role of the grandmother in community theater productions of The Drunkard at the Moose Lodge in Towson, Maryland. In each performance, the role called for her character to sing a song, then collapse to the floor, dead.
That’s what she did on Saturday night, November 22, 1986. “There was tremendous applause. Hearing that, she died,” the director, Richard Byrd, told United Press International. The applause was the last thing Edith Webster would ever hear.
When the other actors called for a doctor and phoned paramedics, most of the two hundred people in the audience thought Edith’s exit was part of the show. When the performance was stopped and they realized Edith had died of a heart attack, most of the audience sat quietly for almost an hour. Some of them prayed.
Edith Webster was sixty. Her daughter, Merri-Todd Webster, told the UPI reporter that the way she went was “not a bad thing . . . a lot of people have been saying it.”
“Night after night, she died and she died,” director Byrd observed, “and last night she died and she really did.”
By the way, what was the name of Edith’s show-stopping song? “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone.”
Kent Stork was a community theater actor whose death was notable not only for his dedication as an amateur thespian but also for the name of the last play in which he starred.
Kent was already well known to a certain audience long before he stepped onto a stage. For thirty-nine years, he and his wife Joyce ran a flower shop in Fremont, Nebraska, and over time became leading experts on the African violet. Kent won a dozen major awards at national flower shows. He and Joyce traveled as far away as Russia and Hong Kong to speak to growers. They wrote a column for African Violet Magazine that was turned into the book YOU CAN Grow African Violets. One Amazon reviewer called the book “My AV bible.”
After Kent and Joyce hit sixty-five, they decided to retire. They closed Kent’s Flowers in August 2016 and began packing for a move to Henderson, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas. There, they’d be close to their son Zach and his family, and Kent could follow his passion—not African violets but show business. Kent had been bitten by the acting bug several years earlier, when he and Joyce had attended a play in Omaha and he was invited onstage. He won his first role playing the superintendent in an Omaha Community Playhouse production of The Drowsy Chaperone. He’d appear in four more productions, including one in which he acted while inside an iron lung.
“It would have been January 2017 when they arrived in Henderson,” Zach Stork tells us. “They rolled into town at like, 6:00 or 7:00 PM. And my dad had been looking at his phone on the way in, and there was a tryout for a play that was happening that night. He’d been in the car all day, and everyone’s exhausted, and he’s leaving at nine to go try out for a play somewhere. So that was definitely going to be his retirement hobby.”
Kent didn’t get that part but within months won a starring role at Henderson’s community theater company, Theatre in the Valley. The dark comedy opened on Friday night, April 21, and was set to continue for eight more weekend performances.
On Sunday, April 30, Kent and Joyce attended church and Bible class before Kent took the stage for the 2:00 PM matinee. Joyce was in the audience.
“When he first comes out onstage, it was supposed to be like he had just gotten out of a shower,” Zach says. “So he came out soaking wet, and my mom could just tell that he seemed a little off, and she knew the script well enough that she could tell that he missed a line.”
“He didn’t look right,” Joyce later told the Fremont Tribune. “His coloring wasn’t right. He was panting and I kept waiting for the panting to stop and it didn’t. Then I realized he was having trouble standing.”
“They completed part of a scene, and he exited,” Zach explains. “The funny part, the story that I tell people, is that my mom was there, and she saw him not looking well. And then he kissed another woman, put a gun into his robe, exited the stage, and that was kind of the last she saw him fully conscious. The director came and got my mom. My dad was backstage, trying to fight to the bitter end, saying that he just needed to catch his breath. Then it was like, ‘No, we need to call 911.’”
The show was stopped. Paramedics arrived and rushed Kent Stork to St. Rose Dominican Hospital.
Zach posted on Facebook from the hospital the following day:
Great and sad news from the last 24 hours. This morning Janna and I were blessed with the birth of our beautiful daughter Lydia, and they are both doing well. The sad part is that my dad Kent Stork suffered a heart attack yesterday afternoon and died in this very same hospital less than 9 hours before his granddaughter was born. Circle of life.
“It’s kind of interesting how things line up like that,” Zach says. “We were preparing for my daughter to come . . . and then a surprise heart attack that happened less than twenty-four hours before. It’s actually good that he was pronounced dead a little bit before midnight, so he and my daughter don’t share the same date of departure and arrival.”
Kent Stork had died two days before his sixty-seventh birthday. Zach’s mother Joyce, a devout Lutheran, told the Tribune’s Tammy Real-McKeighan that she was comforted knowing that her husband was “safe in the Lord’s hands,” and “that when that last day comes, that I’ll be there, too, and that we’ll see the Lord together.”
How about Zach, the eldest of Kent Stork’s two sons? Did he take comfort knowing his father died doing what he loved?
“You know what?” he replies. “I do, because he had gone from working fifty, sixty hours a week for four decades, and then retired, and six months later, he was gone. But he was able to go, doing something that he was interested in.
“Honestly, my dad was somebody who liked attention. And the day he died, for at least a couple of hours, he was trending. When you went to the main website of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, his death story was above the story about the new Raiders stadium being built. He would’ve been kind of tickled to know that his passing garnered such attention.”
There was another reason that Kent Stork’s death got attention: the name of the play was Art of Murder. Zach is able to laugh about that. “When the newspaper posted the link to the article to Facebook, I couldn’t help but read through some of the comments,” he says. “Some were like, ‘Sounds like a bad episode of Murder, She Wrote.’ That’s kind of funny.”
He continues, “When he was brought to the hospital, he had this stage gun in his pocket. I think the hospitals here are used to having real guns come into the emergency room. And my mom actually got a call late that night from the coroner’s office to see if she thought this was a suspicious death that needed to be investigated. No, not because of the name of the play. I think it was just because of the odd circumstances, where he died while performing.”
Broadway star David Burns was singing, dancing, and acting his heart out on Friday, March 12, 1971. He was onstage at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia, in an out-of-town tryout for John Kander and Fred Ebb’s latest musical, 70, Girls, 70.
Kander and Ebb had written the songs for Cabaret. They’d go on to musicals like Chicago and Fosse (and write “New York, New York,” the Liza Minnelli showstopper that became Frank Sinatra’s anthem), but this show was a bit more risky in concept. The plot concerned the residents of a retirement hotel, and seventy was the average age of the cast members. Each night, producer Arthur Whitelaw had to worry about whether the entire cast would survive to make it to Broadway. In fact, Burns, best known for his long-running role as Horace Vandergelder in Hello, Dolly!, had signed on to play Harry the Desk Clerk only weeks earlier. He was sixty-eight and had replaced Eddie Foy Jr., who couldn’t remember his lines at sixty-six.
Onstage on this night, everyone was doing just fine: the show was getting laughs, and the musical numbers were boffo. Then, around 10:00 PM, near the end of the second act, David Burns literally sang and danced and acted his heart out. In the middle of the number, he exclaimed, “How about this move!” He did a double take and spun around. The audience roared with laughter. Burns then clutched his chest and fell to the stage. It was a heart attack.
During the confusion that followed, Burns’s understudy, Coley Worth, helped drag his body offstage. Backstage, Worth tried to revive him, to no avail. David Burns was dead.
Producer Arthur Whitelaw did his best to put a positive spin (no pun intended) on the death of his star: “He went, I guess, the way he would have liked to have gone. He died the way he lived. He died after one of the biggest laughs of the evening.”
Whitelaw later told Coley Worth to prepare to take over the role of Harry the Desk Clerk for the Saturday matinee. Worth’s life had led to this moment. He was born Coleman Rothmund sixty-two years earlier and first took the stage as a kid, performing in his father’s minstrel show before running away to join a vaudeville circuit. He made his Broadway debut in 1927 in a show called A la Carte, and in the decades since had been in countless productions. He’d understudied for David Burns in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Hello, Dolly! but had never been given a chance like this.
He managed five hours of sleep that night and was back on the Forrest Theatre stage at 9:00 AM Saturday morning, rehearsing for the 2:00 PM show. He went over the book, piece by piece. This early in the process, there were many scenes he hadn’t yet studied. He knew he’d have to wing it and do the best he could.
That’s what Coley Worth did. He learned what he could and when he hit the stage for the show, he let instinct handle the rest. When he missed a cue or flubbed a line, he improvised. He invented. He adlibbed. The audience was never the wiser. Arthur Whitelaw and the other backers stood at the back of the house and knew they were witnessing something very special.
After the show, Whitelaw came backstage and embraced the actor.
“Well, we got through it,” Worth said.
“It was fine, fine,” Whitelaw assured him. “You did a wonderful job!”
Teary-eyed costars congratulated him, whispered a “bravo,” and patted him on the back. Someone asked Coley Worth if he thought he’d wind up taking over the leading role on Broadway. Coley smiled wistfully, sadly, knowingly. “They’ll probably bring in a star,” he said.
He was correct. After the evening performance, Arthur Whitelaw closed the show and announced that the play was heading back to rehearsals in New York. When 70, Girls, 70 opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on April 15, 1971, Hans Conried was starring in David Burns’s role. The show ran for nine previews and thirty-five performances before it closed a month later.
Coley Worth lived to seventy-nine. He died of pneumonia in Port St. Lucie, Florida.
In a remembrance of David Burns printed in the New York Times two weeks after his death, Hello, Dolly! star Carol Channing recalled their reaction to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination: “The evening’s performance had been canceled due to the tragedy and, while I cried, Davey handed me Kleenex and fed me lines. We decided then and there that the lucky ones ‘died with their boots on.’ The only way to go, we agreed, was in the line of duty. . . . I cannot think of any way that Davey would rather go.”