Only in New York is there a ten-minute line at the coat check in a building that is generally understood to be on fire.

The acrid smell of smoke began to rise through the floor near the bar at the Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub at 10:15pm last night, roughly 25 minutes into the second show of the evening: a benefit for the Waterwell theater company, one of the city’s cleverest and most entertaining young troupes. (Its recent offerings have included The Persians and Marco Millions.) The show had been off to a good start: funny banter from members of the group, interspersed with musical numbers from past Waterwell shows performed by established theater actors—including Urinetown’s spirited Nancy Opel and Company’s adorable Elizabeth Stanley. But it soon became impossible to deny that something was going terribly wrong at the back of the room. Ominous clouds of foul-smelling vapor rose visibly from the ground; the entire room was cleared into the lobby, and minutes later a fleet of fire trucks had arrived on the scene.

Evacuation was less than immediate. In addition to the aforementioned coat-check line, there was a brave, concerted effort on the part of individual attendees to rescue the gift bags that awaited them in a side room. Calmly confused patrons listened for further instruction in the Public’s lobby, then spilled out to the street for cigarettes and fire-themed quips. “This was one hot benefit,” said Joe’s Pub’s unflapped director Bill Bragin. “It’s hot up here tonight! Oh, we’re on fire! Anyone have a light?” riffed Waterwell ensembler Kevin Townley. “Where the fuck were the firemen last night when we were trying out bits for this show? Now it’s writing itself!”

The dashing Heath Calvert, a Good Vibrations survivor who had performed a duet with Stanley, recalled that he had also been forced to evacuate a theater last year, when he was performing in the New York Musical Theater Festival. “This is pretty much the usual for me,” he said. “Except last time I was dressed like a deputy, so I could help people leave the building in an orderly fashion.”

The smoke, according to one fireman, was coming from between floors at the Public; hoses were deployed, flooring torn up, and the show could not go on. At around 10:45pm, a fire alarm briefly sounded, but by then nearly everyone had gone home, and the Waterwell troupers were packing up their props. “Well, you know, that’s live theater I guess,” said Townley, in classic show-people style. “Apparently my material is more advanced than the technical capabilities of Joe’s Pub, and things went all haywire. But at least no one had to pay their drink tickets!”

Waterwellian Hanna Cheek couldn’t quite hide her dumbfounded disappointment with the benefit’s premature finale. Everyone in the company had joked that the show would be a disaster, she explained, but they had expected things to work out, as such things usually do. “It’s been a drumroll from the get-go, and this is the rim shot at the end,” she said. “You never think [the disaster] is actually going to happen. This is unbelievable.”

But if the benefit did not quite go as planned, Waterwell actor-director Tom Ridgely noted wryly, it was an evening that few in attendance would forget. “When we started this theater company, we always said that we wanted our shows to be like happenings, where people would experience some real shit instead of some phony, fake shit,” he said. “I think tonight we made that happen.”