A couple years ago, I had the opportunity to play Miss Honey in a community theater production of Matilda. The show was a blast, and I have a lot of great memories from the production, some of which I have previously shared on this blog. There is a cautionary tale from the experience that I like to share when I hear someone talk about their caffeine dependence during tech week.

I was never someone who drank a lot of caffeine growing up. I had never liked the taste of coffee or tea.  We didn’t drink much soda in my house. My mother had always hated energy drinks, so they were always a sort of forbidden fruit to me.

Early in my college career, though, I discovered the joys of popping the tab on a can of Monster and slamming out an essay due at 10 AM the next morning in he small hours between midnight and 4 AM. Energy drinks were a way for me to get more done, even when I was exhausted… especially when I was exhausted.

The side effect of having never drank much caffeine, however, was that I hadn’t quite figured out where my tolerance for it sat. I seemed invincible. I was 21 and dumb, and the acid and sugar didn’t give me reflux yet, so the world was my oyster.

I had especially taken to consuming energy drinks during tech weeks and before performances. It felt like a good way to get my energy up for a show after working a long shift or staying up late completing homework. It became such a habit that, for a long time, I mentally related the taste of the Pipeline Punch flavor of Monster with the experience of putting my make up on in the dressing room of my local community theater. Tasting my traditional pre-show flavor of Monster had me feeling like the critic in that scene from Ratatouille.

So, enter Matilda. This high-energy show had a huge cast, most of them children. I made the truly bad decision of accepting daytime shifts before every one of our shows: a shift before the Thursday show, a shift before the Friday show, and a shift before the Saturday show… having gone out with the cast after each of those shows, too. Suffice to say, I was tired.

No matter. On the way in to the Saturday show, I picked up my usual can of monster from a gas station, and I also picked up a second can in preparation for the Sunday show. I started drinking my monster on the rest of the drive to the theater. 

But I was just so tired that day. Really tired. After finishing the can, I realized it had not energized me as much as I had hoped. I still felt miserably drawn.

I kept thinking the feeling would get better as I spent time chatting in the green room and warming up my body and my voice. But the closer we got to showtime, the clearer it was that I might just have to perform the show exhausted. I didn’t want to do this though– it was the second to last show, and I had a lot of family coming that night!

The line of logic was sound, and the conclusion inevitable: I popped the top on my second can of Monster. I could hear my mother’s voice screaming in my head. She always hated that stuff, but I had never experienced any adverse effects from it. And, well, I was 21 and invincible and dumb.

I finished the second can before the top of the show, and I was feeling pretty good. However, my character had a bit of a wait before she first came on stage. And it wasn’t until around then that the full effect of both of these Monsters finally kicked in. 

I suppose it’s a good thing that Miss honey is an anxious character with an emotional story arc… Because I spent that show visibly vibrating with caffeine jitters, my heart pounding, my brain operating at double time. I was shivering like it was freezing cold. It was the middle of summer, in a building that had very old (read: effectively nonexistent) AC . At a certain point in the show, it hit me that the “stage fright” I was feeling was actually the physical and mental anxiety produced by drinking 300 mg of caffeine in the span of 2-3 hours, and that it wasn’t going away.

At that point, there was nothing to do but to lean into it. I embraced the anxious twitching and elevated heart rate as a character choice. I can’t say it served me well the whole show, but, well, at least I was really in character for those scary scenes with Mrs. Trunchbull.

The moral of the story is: take care of yourself during your tech week/show run, don’t try to fix the problem with caffeine, and definitely don’t try to fix it with double your standard caffeine dosage.