Theatre

I broke into theatre in high school. I was taking a shakespeare class with an English teacher at Pike Central. There were only 7 of us in the class, and we basically spent all of our class time reading scripts outloud and trading off roles. (I believe we did Taming of the Shrew, Midsummer, Othello, and...a couple others, I can't remember what they were) At any rate, it was at this time that they were doing auditions for the fall play, and an exchange student from Australia talked about trying out for the play one day. My teacher suggested I try out as well, and the Australian girl agreed. I thought about it, reluctant to, because at that point I didn't realize the school even did a play AND a musical and in those days I didn't want to sing.

But i did, and I was cast. The way this particular play worked, All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten it gave Hays, our director, some freedom in casting. The show has a hard-line cast of 5...but its not a linear play, just a series of very vaguely intertwined vignettes. So he passed out the scenes and characters to the different people. Our high school theatre was very hierarchical. Seniors received, and still receive highest priority for the largest roles, and it doesn't hurt to be one of Hays' favorites. Two of Hays' favorites, two seniors received 7 scenes a piece. The third favorite received 6. He cast me in 7. I am still proud of that. I was nervous as hell, but very proud of it.

There is this particular monologue he gave to me in it about listening to a Beethoven symphony to lift me out of an emotional funk. It was very long, and relied solely on my shoulders as a performer. I think writing this blog at all came out of thoughts I had about what it would be like if I were to be given that Beethoven Monologue again to perform. Of course, it would seem i could do it even better now, with the experience and knowledge I've gained since then. But another part of me wishes I could go back to the raw, innocence of how I approached it the first time.

I know now if I were handed the monologue. I'd be dissapointed in it, because its not a good monologue, its not well written, its boring even. But I never had a thought like that then. I didn't know plays could be anything but exciting. Part of me is afraid that I know that part of me is gone completely.

I did 5 more shows at school, and 5 more shows at neighboring community theatres before I graduated high school. I had found this thing that made me happy, and it seemed maybe I was actually good at it so I leapt on it and I wouldn't let go.

When I got to college I was very green as far as theatre, but so very excited to be going there and learning new things about it and was so excited for it my freshman year. My mentor there, Paul Hildebrand reminisces often about an e-mail I sent him before I got there about how excited I was to do theatre, and how I wanted to do it anywhere I possibly could, and how I couldn't wait to get started at Hanover.

I was still riding the high horse after the first year at Hanover when I felt like I'd learned so much and was able to go back home to direct The Music Man with this wealth of knowledge that I didn't have before. It did really help with The Music Man and that show was very successful for the theatre (I belive its still might be the biggest grosser for Veale Creek...but probably because we had about 2 more performances than they normally do) I went back to school my sophomore year and started to get a little bit in the doldrums at the school...maybe for a lot of reasons. My closest friends from the year before mostly started to become affiliated with greek organizations...which, whether they liked it or not, was not good for our friendship. I was also becoming more pretentious (Hanover College is a pretension factory, doing its best to shoot you out in four years a stuffed-shirt, pretentious, liberal thinking reactionary) that year as I was taking classes I'd never thought about before like theology and philosophy, and was riding the high of The Music Man thing and everything else in theatre going so well.

Sophomore year I was still eager for theatre, though getting bogged down in getting all my other stuff done at the school was slowly creeping its way in.

Then I worked at Shawnee Summer Theatre for a summer. It was here that I received a most rude of awakenings. I suddenly was a tiny fish tossed into the sea with people who had trained at better schools, and had been going at it longer, and doing it better for sometime. I met some real actors, worked with the winner of Division III Irene Ryan, who's become a good friend, and was left to do a lot of thinking about where I was in theatre. In short, it made me bitter as hell.

Had I picked a horrible college? I didn't put a lot of thought into it. Why don't get to do things that they do? Why do I still, to this day, know nothing about the Meisner technique? Why didn't I hear anything about the Alexander technique until my final weeks at the college? What are all these things these people are learning that I am not(I could go on)? Thankfully I used alot of it to improve, learning alot of new things from my friends at Shawnee that made me a much better actor going into HC that year. The department recognized it too, I was cast as the lead in 2 of 4 plays, and was told by the director of a third that I auditioned best for a lead but he knew I was going to be the lead in another one and wanted to spread the wealth.

The mix of this success and the sudden bitterness over my (lack of) theatre education blew my head up. I became very temperamental and judgmental my junior year. Not to mention I was getting more and more tired of Hanover itself. If i hadn't gotten a job that I really loved at a local winery that year, things could've been much worse. It provided distraction from the theatre department I was beginning to severely dislike, as well as just gave me a different environment to get away from school at. (Not to mention, tasty wines.)

i became a person that year that I deeply regret now. I even got into a verbal confrontation with one of my closest teachers/directors over his "lack of organization" I was a prick. Thankfully that very teacher was the one that called me out on it at the end of the year, and it really hit home to me. I understood exactly what he was saying, and maybe hadn't realized until then just how I'd let things blow up.

Another summer at the Shawnee and senior year at Hanover...I was more balanced. There's a part of me that I've retained that is demanding of the people I do theatre with, but is not bitter or as confrontational as I once was. I did end up quitting the production of Oedipus I was cast in that year, so some of that negativity obviously still remained. But, I've never regretted my decision to drop out of the show, and the reasons were far less personal than they must've seemed.

At any rate, while I still came out of my very bitter Junior year with a jaded opinion of the theatre education one receives at Hanover, I was able to function without letting that bitterness be what was ruling my work in the building. I was also becoming more and more distanced from theatre. I wasn't in love with it they way I was before...(then stepped in Improv and the trip to Chicago, but that's another blog)and I'm probably not as in love with it now as I was. (Might explain why I wrote all this out.)

It is another bog, but doing improv had stepped in and become something I loved and still love now as much as i did then. This helped harbor a friendship with the two men I consider my best friends(besides Casey of course) at Hanover, Jon and Brandon. And in Spring term, I had the definite best days of my life at Hanover. Every night Jon, Brandon, and I were having fun. Improv was going wonderfully.

But most of all, I made up with the man whom I'd focused most of my negative attention towards at Hanover. We never really spoke about it outright, but both I and one of my professor's (different from the two mentioned before) had an unspoken dislike for each other. We were tolerant of one another, but I had no respect for him, and he had little interest in me. But, something about the class I took with him that last term, maybe it just finally broke. It was clear that we were tired of harboring such negative feelings for eachother, and just become collaeagues. Friends, even, I hope.

I graduated in not only a better place, but the best place emotionally I had been at Hanover in four years, and carried that into my current job.

I'm still not sure how I feel about theatre. I love it, I hate it. I enjoy it. Its my job. I love my job. But is it really theatre? The entire world of theatre is very pretentious. Its hard for it not to be. I mean, its playing pretend. Its aggravating.

I know right now, I'd rather do improv. I might wanna go to grad school. I mostly wanna teach high schoolers, teach the type of kids that are like me when I was their age - so excited to do theatre, so eager to learn about it. I got sick of myself when i was a bitter theatre person. I don't want to be around many of those anymore.

If you read all of these words, you're a saint. I really wrote this blog entry for me, as it had been all over my mind the last couple days. Feel free to comment on any part if you'd like. I always wonder if others have similar experiences in theatre as I do.