Going Home or Going Backwards?

Last week, I came up to SLC on Thursday to see the opera, and decided it was too much bother to drive back down to college on Friday, because I was needed Saturday at my nephew's 2nd birthday party. I went to see my favorite english teacher (and talked with her for two hours, it was so wonderful) at the high school on Friday instead. Near the end of the conversation, she told me that construction on the new little theatre was finally finished, and it was open and in use and everything. I couldn't resist heading down to see the improvements after we parted ways. The little theatre door was locked, so I went and poked my head into the auditorium stage, "just to see". You know, to look at what scenery they've worked on, what they've done with the place, whatever. I spent so much of my life in that room during high school - I should see how they're taking care of it.

Click for a rather long treatise on my feelings about my high school theatre.



From the second I walked through the side door, propped wide open, I could barely breathe. I've never felt such a rush of intense emotion before. My throat is sealing up even now, just thinking about it. I don't know if I could even identify what emotions were there - a mix of anger, disappointment, nostalgia, exhaustion, confusion, more anger, and a big helping of desperate longing. Even though I hated so many aspects of it, that stage was home. My acting class is pretty much my only involvement in the theatre program right now (I'm still kind of afraid of it, to be honest), and I didn't realize how much I had missed theatre until that moment. I'm intensely grateful that, by that point, it was so late that no one was anywhere near the stage. I don't know how I would have dealt with anyone intruding right then - especially one of the People in Charge.

I spent almost 10 minutes quietly wandering around just the stage itself - hitting my marks, remembering things that had happened during the runs of both Follies and Showboat (here is where I almost passed out during that one performance that I was so sick and Willy had to catch me and then send me back out onstage, this is where Laurie and I would sit and gossip and roll our eyes, this is where Brandon almost killed me during a Follies tech rehearsal when I got in the way...), totally lost in thought and sensation. I'm still not sure if I could have spoken aloud if anyone had confronted me. Everything was so overwhelming, and I completely lost myself in the memories and the overpowering emotions. It was...eye-opening, to say the least. I don't like knowing that it still has so much power over me, but at the same time, it felt so much like coming home again. There are parts of that stage and that program that I loved; parts that I was proud to throw myself into with reckless abandon and get so much back in return. I look back on those months with such a negative eye, but I know that I wouldn't have stayed with it if I wasn't happy to some extent. And theatre made me happy, even when it gave me so much ridiculous grief.

Obnoxious emotions aside, I took the opportunity to poke around and explore the back rooms. When will they learn that locking the front door to a room doesn't block access to it when they're all connected?! Heaven, unfortunately, was locked, but I investigated the changes and similarities in the wood room and the costume shop, and wandered around the guy's and girl's "dressing rooms" in the wings. Instead of trying to sell the Boat that was the main setpiece from last year's show (who'd want to buy that monolith, even if they could get it through the door?), they're repainting it into various storefronts for Wedding Singer. Thought that was interesting. The little things were different - all of the walls and floors are black again, there's 80's-themed knick-knacks scattered around instead of ones from the 1800's, glue guns inhabit the many spaces that multicolored paint cans were once stashed. But the basics were the same - the random setpieces were still there, piled precariously on top of one another, the curtain was made of the same heavy blue velvet that slips so easily between my fingers, the almost out-of-place spirit of reverence that the stage lights bring, illuminating the clouds of dust floating in the air.

The little theatre may have been locked, but the guys' dressing room wasn't. While in our old little theatre, actors were trapped on the wings of the stage until a blackout, when they could run across the stage, through the door, and out into the hallway. With the new theatre, the stage is connected by a series of twisting hallways, presumably to block light from getting through, to the dressing rooms and beyond. When the door to the guys' dressing room swung open to my touch, I knew that I could get in through the back "tunnels". This was a super-fun experience - half the lights were motion-activated and half weren't, so sneaking through the hallways in the dark, trying to observe everything I could about the new theater, was incredibly tense. Our director's office is now in a portable, but I didn't know that and I thought that, at any second, he could come around a corner and catch me and look down his nose at me. I felt like a ninja/patron in a haunted house. The hallways were pitch black with flickering exit signs that gave just enough light to see by, and the halls seemed to twist and turn and go on forever. I had no idea what could be ahead of me, so every foot I gained was a great accomplishment.

When I finally made it to the stage, it was pitch black but with enough light seeping through the cracks around the outside doors that I could vaguely see the shapes of the Dracula set on stage (it looks...melodramatic. Much like Dracula, and much MUCH like I expect this version of Dracula to be.), a blinking light at the top of the soundbooth, and the rows of chairs. I thought that She was going to be waiting in the soundbooth for me, grinning maniacally (her super-bleached teeth glowing in the dark) before flicking the lightswitch, glaring angrily, and having me arrested for trespassing or something. Nobody was there, though, and after a while I worked up the nerve to turn on the lights, instead of sneaking around in the dark.

The facilities are just as gorgeous as He'd planned, large and spacious and sleek. I'm a little jealous that I'll never get to perform with them. The stage itself is no longer two feet off the ground - I knelt down at the edge of it and gently felt my way to the floor (it was still dark at this point), only for my foot to hit the carpet after 6 inches or so. I should have just taken a leap of faith and jumped off, but I didn't want to drastically misjudge the distance and break something in the dark. Laying there miserably with a broken ankle until he came in on Monday would have been an absolutely peachy way to spend my weekend.

I made my way back through the back hallways (which were much shorter once I knew where I was going), and took a few minutes to go back through the girls' dressing room, where the majority of the costumes are stored. Simply opening a cabinet and remembering the hours spent sorting through that particular batch of dresses or fur coats or shoes brought me some powerful nostalgia. I could pick up nearly any item in those cabinets and come up with a memory of it - these shoes were in Titanic, I tried to get C to wear this dress for Seussical but I'm glad we found the other one because it was much prettier, this was the coat that I wanted to wear in Showboat so badly that I changed another, completed costume just to fit it in.

It's hard to believe that so little time away from my wicked stage feels like so very long. The theatre program at my high school put me through hell, so much that even now I second-guess my every step in my college theatre program when I should be enjoying myself. I went back "just to see", but it opened my eyes to a whole crop of emotions that I thought I were over and done. If you spend that much of your waking hours devoted to something, though, you're doing it wrong if it doesn't leave its mark on you. For better or for worse.