Notes on theatre

So now that the show is over, I think I might actually have some time to start writing in this thing again.  So I figured it’d be natural to write about the show.  

Doing theatre can, at times, be terribly taxing, but in all honesty I don’t know what I’d do without it.  I’ve been, with the exception of winter break, in steady rehearsals pretty much straight from October until now.  We started readthroughs for Much Ado the day after we closed Nuts, so there was nary a break between the two.

A cast is always an interesting thing.  In a lot of ways, it really is a lot closer than a group of coworkers or colleagues, and in some ways it’s closer than most groups of friends… and really, that makes perfect sense.  To be in a cast and to perform with a group of people, regardless of how well you know them before you start, involves and requires a certain great amount of trust.  You have to trust those who perform with you to do the moves they’re supposed to, to do their lines, to make their cues, and to not just go batshit crazy and leave you there to cover an unexpected situation on the spot.  Because of the trust issue, casts generally become close.  They are their own self-contained community, which will exist only until closing night, and then it will be dissolved again.

I think that’s one of the reasons I really enjoy theatre as much as I do… sure, I like the opportunities for expressiveness and I like the attention and I like performing… but I think more than that, I love being a part of something entirely unique, being a creative cog in some great creative machine that exists only temporarily, that was assembled to do a show and will, when the curtain goes down for the last time, be dissolved and will never exist again.  Though they’ve been rehearsed over and over, each show is different in often minor, unnoticeable ways – somebody moves differently or puts a different emphasis on a word or line – but when all is said and done, each show is completely unique in its own right.  And I think that when all is said and done, that’s what I love most about theatre – you are a part of something, something that will never be reproduced or recreated, and when the curtain closes, the house empties, the set is struck and the costumes are hung up for the last time, all that you have left are your individual memories of what once was.