I didn’t spend a great deal of time acting on stage when I was growing up, and actually, I don’t remember doing plays at all during grade school. I’d have to fact check that with my Girl Group because between all of them, they remember more about my childhood than I do.
Although theatrics were (perhaps) not an option during elementary school, we would be assembled on the big wooden stage in the gym as a choir, especially just prior to the city-wide music competitions, no doubt in order to see how many of us were going to be scared into muteness.
(Side note: One year, I faked an entire 3-minute song. I was to have been part of the group of 3 or 4 recorder ‘instrumentalists’ who were accompanying the school choir through a song. I missed the first couple of notes, got too scared to try to catch up, and went through the entire song playing air-recorder instead. Not my finest effort, I’ll admit.)
However, my high school would put on a play or show every spring that people were actually charged money to watch. Its run would span several nights and even included at least one weekday matinee for the local grade school kids. I’ll just say that those little kids could really roast a fledgling troupe by heckling, squirming, and by belly laughing at parts that were never meant to be funny at all. They did everything short of throwing tomatoes at the stage, but bless their little insulting hearts, their disinterest and boorish behaviour guaranteed that the paying audiences would seem like a gentle walk in the park, by comparison!
I was part of a few of these major productions during my stint in high school. Although I never got as far as to distinguish myself into any sort of titled role and mostly languished in The Chorus (although I think I was part of a dance sequence once…), I do remember once being given a part in which I had exactly one line. These productions were 2-3 hours in length, by the way. One line.
My anxiety and nervousness threatened to overtake me, of course, but during each performance, in exactly the right spot, I would hear my crackling strangled voice squeak out that single line and I would feel like a Real Performer!
As with Brownies, the Christmas Pageant, and my efforts on the volleyball team, when it was boiled down, I was really only in it for the outfits. Being part of the theatrical performances in high school not only included having my own specific costume, but it also meant that I got to wear makeup. And a LOT of it. When I look through photos from those staged plays, I marvel at just how much makeup we wore. We must have all looked like mimes from the audience’s point of view! It’s quite a risk putting heavy stage makeup on a bunch of spotty teens, though I suppose a certain percentage of it melted off our greasy skin by the time the curtain rose anyway. But who knows, maybe none of us could be heard passed the first row so any communication needed to be bluntly acted out by our exaggerated gestures, outfits, and makeup.
The competition for the bigger roles of the play was often fierce, although that never bothered the ranks that I swam in. Mind you, snagging a spot in the throng of background characters even took some doing. There were auditions for the play starting in the Fall so that the casting could be set by the first of the year. Starting in January, costumes would need to be made or sourced, a plethora of lighting and sound guys would have to be signed up (the only time of the year that most of the A/V club members were even noticed), the stage scenery would be designed and made by the art department, scripts handed out to be memorized, and scenes rehearsed endlessly. The behind-the-scenes organization must have been epic—not that any of us were smart enough to notice stuff like that at the time.
Finally, still smarting from the bruises from the element school kids’ matinee, we would face our opening night! How exciting! With stomachs full of butterflies, costumes would be chased down, make up applied with a trowel, and we’d take our places behind the thick velvet curtains that edged the stage.
There always seemed to be one more final calamity backstage but as soon as that was hurriedly sorted, the guys in the sound booth would be given their cue. As the house lights dramatically dimmed and we all gasped for what felt like the last gulp of fresh air in the place, the curtain would be lifted, the spotlight would find who it was looking for, and the now-familiar opening of Act 1, Scene 1 would begin.
The next 3 hours would be a blur of frantically recited lines and squeaked out songs until eventually we all lined up along the front of the stage, holding onto each other’s sweaty hands and bowing to the audience who would be clapping enthusiastically, more because the show was finally done than because they found it moving in any sort of way.
With each year’s school show, new-found popularities would spring up for the duration of the show’s run, legends would be woven, unlikely friendships and alliances formed, and studies would be completely ignored. While my personal acting forays didn’t seed in me the desire to become a performer, I was still able to learn a few lessons from those very unique circumstances and I have no regrets. To borrow a summary from Mr. C. Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness”, and surely that is enough.
