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While compiling the story on today’s Page 11 about local student productions in the one-act competitions, I couldn’t help but let my theater nerd come out.
I’ve been in some community productions in my adult life, and was actually a theater major for a minute in college. (Practicality won out.)
My favorite memories are from high school, where I got a late start trodding the boards for the first time as a junior.
It was so long ago. How long?
Perhaps this visual will offer more on how things have changed.
My director in high school belted out his acting advice in the school theater, which was actually the open end of the gymnasium, while sitting in the front row and chain-smoking Newports.
He was a proud Swede, having once lived in his family’s home country. His name, and I’m not making this up, was Folke Person.
His cigarettes were often fetched by a student-director from the Food ‘n’ Fuel across town.
One of the great feats achieved during downtime in rehearsal was sneaking up to the teachers’ lounge and hiding all the ashtrays. The next morning, we hung around the door and heard the disgruntled mutterings over coffee and Styrofoam cups half-full of water brimming with butts.
Kids, you live in a world where your kids will never know that teachers once smoked in bars, and, lands, in the schools.
And that is about how long it’s been since those high school theater days.
Some 15 years ago, I was roped into a community production of “Oklahoma!” The intent was to simply shore up the ranks. The small high school used adults in its productions to fill out the cast. I thought maybe I’d just stand behind the scenes and bolster the chorus.
That’s not what happened. I was given the role of Jud, the baddie in the production who lives in a rat-infested smokehouse and pines, creepily, after the farmer’s fair daughter.
It meant a lot of lines and even a solo. Oy.
It would be a fitting tribute to Folke, who was also my English teacher, to quote T.S. Eliot in describing my thoughts after my theatrical intentions for a bit part proved null:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.
No! I am not Prince Hamlet,
nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool”
It was not my idea to begin acting in high school. My choir director, whom we called Miss A, insisted on me playing the part of the scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz.” The person who had earned the role was caught doing something, I don’t remember what, that got him suspended and losing his chance.
So I had little choice. Miss A was not exactly one to take “no” for an answer.
Yeah, I still tend to get in over my skis with each production.
I really felt my age while rehearsing for “Oklahoma!” As a 40-something, I no longer was that 16-year-old brainless, straw-stuffed scarecrow who could flop hard to the floor with nary a body part screaming in revolt.
As an adult, it was a challenge getting a tottering brain to remember lines and where to go on stage. I wondered why this seemed so great back in high school.
It’s a lot of work.
We crazy adults and our work-a-day minds. Our patterns of comfort. We the people who overwork ourselves only to have little energy for life’s pleasures.
I remember plays being exhilarating in high school and early college because I had no idea what work was. Didn’t know what exhaustion meant either. Or creaky limbs. Or interpersonal relationship obligations.
No, I just wanted to go home and put my feet up at night and then fall blissfully to sleep.
Flop sweating on my pillow while going over lines was not included in the wish list.
I loved Jud’s solo in “Oklahoma!” It is a brooding lament of a man who feels the world has done him wrong and now it is time for payback, including making that girl his own.
It’s fun acting the creep.
I had just one misstep in the weekend of shows. I totally blanked on my lines and the charming 17-year-old who played Curly gently prodded me along until I broke out of my stupor.
It had, indeed, been a while since I’d soaked up the feeling of camaraderie among actors and the absolute thrill of an appreciative audience and a show well done.
It sure beats singing old show tunes in the shower.
This mixing of memory and desire, T.S. Eliot once told me, can become a complicated business. Who knows when the opportunity will strike to get on stage again, and hearken back to those memorable days in high school — so many years ago, where the shroud of cigarette smoke likely still hangs above the front row.
Mike Creger is a reporter and page designer for the Pine Knot News. Email him at [email protected]