Untimely Exit for Stage Fave

You'd have to go back to the sudden death of "Rent"'s young composer/lyricist Jonathan Larson in 1996, on the eve of the work's Off-Broadway premiere, to find a theatrical tragedy as untimely and bewildering as Kellie Waymire's death, apparently from natural causes, last week.

A small, sweet-faced actress with serious theatre chops and some resemblance to Renee Zellweger, Waymire had returned from a TV shoot on Thursday evening, in time to go onstage that weekend for her critically acclaimed run in "Kate Crackernuts" at the 24th Street Theater. It was her boyfriend, scenic designer Gary Smoot, who found her on the kitchen floor at 1:30 Friday morning, according to sources involved with the show.

Friday night's performance was cancelled, and the cast and crew gathered at the theater, shaken, to sort out their feelings. They thought of how insistent Kellie, a busy TV actress, had been that she appear in as many performances of the play as she could. Her understudy had gone on a few times, but Kellie made a point of scheduling her TV commitments around the play's run as much as she could.

There was no contest, then, said director Jessica Kubzansky: The best way to honor Kellie's commitment to show was to go on with the remaining three performances, last Saturday and this coming weekend.

Eerily, one of Kellie's co-stars told Wicked Little Town that at a post-performance gathering the week before, the cast had been trading stories about their worst fears. Kellie's was that she would die in her home and not be discovered for days.

That her significant other found her so relatively quickly after death is very small comfort. But we take comfort where we can when confronted by such a senseless loss.