The Firebugs by Max Frisch, as staged at Yale Cabaret in 2006. (Taken from the website of set designer Nick Rastenis.)
I have attended literally hundreds of performances at the Yale Cabaret over the past quarter century, so that’s how many times I’ve heard the venue’s famous “fire speech.”
Here, I can do it by heart:
In the unlikely event of a fire, you have three options. You can go (in an orderly fashion) out this exit, up the stairs and onto the path of safety. You can go this way, out the exit, through the garden up the stairs and onto the path of safety. Or you can go down the corridor to the right to the area of refuge, where an attractive New Haven firefighter will rescue you.”
With minor variations, that’s been the basic fire speech for at least 15 years now. I’ve lived with it long enough to remember when the “path of safety” was, as will strike as incredibly obvious now I reveal it to you, “the path to safety.” I wish I’d noted when that little game-of-Telephone-like slip actually entered the weekly ritual, but of course I had no idea that the admittedly more dramatic concept of “the Path of Safety” would still be enshrined in the text well in the 21st century. However pompous “Path of Safety” may sound, it solves the delicate textual of the irritatingly repetitive “to” in the phrase “onto the path to…”
At the time of the “of,” in any case, the Fire Speech had bigger issues. For years, it was delivered with such determination and resolve that nobody noticed that it wasn’t very helpful. Instead of listing “options,” the Fire Speech orators would specifically direct whole sectors of the audience toward the nearest exit, as in “This half of the room can proceed in an orderly fashion out this door…” It took a visiting member of the New Haven Fire Department to point out that fires don’t always begin in the centers of theaters, yet the Cabaret was instructing the audience to fan out as if such an arrangement was a certainty—and had been doing so for years.
Then came a period when the Fire Speech became a freely interpreted text. A think a turning point was when a graduate student playwright (whose name I have sadly forgotten—William something?) delivered a comic, Robert Benchley-esque monologue in which it was posited that the “In Case of Fire” notice in a hotel room was a fragment of a lost Tennessee Williams manuscript. Not long after that (sometime in the mid-1990s), the Fire Speech briefly evolved into a comic tradition as entrenched as the short “York Street” curtain-raisers which preceded Cabaret shows at performances where the audience was largely made up of School of Drama classmates.
The master of Fire Speech mockery was Preston Lane, who ran the Yale Summer Cabaret for a record three summers, and is now known as the co-founder and Artistic Director of Triad Stage in Greensboro, North Carolina. Lane would rework the Fire Speech to fit the mood of the show he was presenting, from Shakespearean to gritty, from rhyming to modernist.
Meanwhile, the school-year Cabaret Fire Speeches got more and more audacious. A personal favorite was when Shane Rettig did a Cabaret show which was basically a set of his own rock songs (Cabaret concerts were looser in those days). He opened the show with a rewrite of Hendrix’s “Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire” as “That’s What You Do in Case of Fire.
Audience members occasionally got into the act. I remember one old gent, about a decade ago, blustering his way into being allowed to deliver the speech, which he did rapid-fire in a comic accent. Unbeknownst to him, that evening’s show was a tragic drama, completely unsuited to the man’s sped-up incendiary send-up.
At some point, the Yale Cabaret officially wised up and began taking the fire speech as seriously as sleep-derived thespians could. The “attractive New Haven firefighter” line (originally “fireman” and adjusted over time to erase any gender bias) is as far as the Fire Speechers let themselves go humor-wise. Presentationally, it is frequently divided into parts and spoken by several different people, but in straightforward fashion.
Which is fine. It’s a tidy little speech, in line with the “unwrap your candies” tropes at every theater anywhere ever. Like Cabaret shows in general, it should strive for concision, balance and quality, and send a clear message when possible, right onto the path of safety.
In any case, as far as I know, there’s never been an actual fire at the Yale Cabaret. A fire marshall visits just before every show, and I’ve heard tales of last-minute trimmings of too-high backdrops or frantic fireproofings of flimsy fabrics. But the show has always gone on. When The Station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island had its unspeakable tragedy in 2003, it affected fire codes throughout the East Coast, and the Yale Cabaret’s seating capacity shrank by a few dozen chairs so there was no question about the audience egressing in an orderly fashion, no matter which of the three options they chose. And no need to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater.