Sacred Spaces

 from Judson Jones, Artistic Director

So this post is a bit like the stew I made this past week: It’s a little bit of this and a dash of that. But I promise you there’s a rhyme & reason to it.

While spending time with family over the holidays, Christa & I found ourselves in the tiny town of Winona, Texas and ended up taking a tour with some family through the old forgotten high school. Winona is a small, sleepy town of around 582 people. I seem to recall dating a girl in my youth from Winona (or perhaps it was Mineola). Anyway, we were walking through the abandoned hallways when we came to the auditorium, now filled with debris, discarded desks, and dust of years past.  I love high school theatre. I'm not sure why exactly. Perhaps for the same reason I love watching high school football: You see a lot of mistakes and a lot of missed opportunities, but there's so much heart. As I walked through the old theater, you could almost see the audiences of the past. Hear their laughter. Feel their suspense. I sat in one of the old wooden seats and strained to hear the heartbeat of the old place.  You just don't see auditoriums like this anymore. Everything has become so utilitarian. Art, by itself, is no longer enough to deserve its own space. Art now has to be art-and. These once magnificent sanctuaries have been replaced by Cafe-toriums and the like. The works of Shakespeare aren’t enough. It can’t be just Horton Foote. It has to be Horton Foote and a Fiesta Station. Sorry. Wasn't my intention to get on a soapbox.

Back to the auditorium. I made my way through the space, across the stage—most of the boards rotted away by time—and found myself in the wings, right outside the dressing room. This is such holy place for me. I stood there, staring at the closed door, and could almost smell the pancake makeup. I thought of how many young actors must have stood there…waiting for the moment. The call for places has been made, but the opening music hasn’t begun yet. You hear the audience just beyond the curtain, people are rushing around, there’s electricity in the air that is palpable…and then there’s a pause. A beat. A divine moment. Everything goes quiet…and you breathe it in. This may not be the Nederlander, but to these magnificent souls it might as well be. As I stood there I thought of the countless students that stood in that same sacred spot. And I felt them. I felt their hopes and dreams, their passion, their love, their nervousness, their joy. And I cried. By myself. Just stood there and took in the moment.

Saturday night Christa and I went to see the Harold Clurman Laboratory Theatre Company’s production of Imagining Heschel at the Stella Adler Studio—a production I highly, highly recommend seeing before it closes on February 11^th. I was again reminded of the holiness of the theatre: to see actors pouring out their very hearts and souls for the audience; to experience a designer’s work as it folds into this world that will become your journey for the time you are there; to hear the words that a playwright has labored over, sometimes for years, to make sure that every word, every bit of punctuation is perfect and needed; to realize a director’s work, the hours of planning and pacing and doubting, all in the hopes that this piece of art connects in some real way with those present. Oh, it is something to be revered. For me, there’s no other place like it on earth.

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What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

from William Franke, Director of Development & Communications

Yesterday I went to see a wonderful production of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure at NYU's Gallatin School. I'm friends with the director and also know one of the performers from working with her in a Gallatin production of 1001 last fall (I was there as a guest artist).

Now, Shakespeare is wonderful and there have been all kinds of articles and musings about how applicable he is to all disciplines & walks of life. But what struck me was my conversation with the young woman I worked with before. She's now a sophomore and when I asked how things were going, she was busy, of course, but she said she was also "figuring out what I want to be when I grow up." While she had a realistic view of this task, she felt a sense of urgency; even though she agreed when I told her she had time yet to figure it out, I could tell she was anxious (as many students are) to get it settled. (She had at least determined that she no longer desired to be a lawyer, so that helped narrow it down.)

I like to think that her experience in the theatre will only serve her well later in life, no matter what course she chooses. The time management skills she's developing when rehearsing a play are invaluable, because she's working both individually and collaboratively with a larger group. There are those times spent exploring the text in rehearsal, but that follows grappling with its mysteries alone, on her own time, so that she has something to bring to the table in those group sessions (not to mention learning her lines on her own time, so her nose isn't always stuck in the script).

The group dynamic should also prove beneficial. Regardless of the laurels bestowed on any one person for any one achievement, the fact is that no one truly accomplishes anything alone, whether it's landing on the moon, winning an election or a championship, creating the next iPhone, or discovering the next great medical breakthrough.

But really the most important way this student's theatre experiences will have an impact on her later life is something we can't pinpoint now. Something intangible now will come as an epiphany years down the road. I recently read a story about the late Steve Jobs and his similar experience while at Reed College, where he took a calligraphy course:

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them....

[emphasis added]

And it's this subtle, unquantifiable effect that both theatre & the arts has that is perhaps the most profound. This ability to permeate our consciousness, only to bubble up in unexpected ways—whether we're students (lucky enough to be) studying the arts in (the ever-dwindling) arts programs in schools, or a member of the audience at a play. I firmly believe that there will be someone out there, maybe even at our next reading (on November 21st), who at some point will have a chord struck deep within them and realize how that piece of art relates to a challenge they're facing in their own life, and that realization, that connection will help them overcome that challenge, triumph & endure. Or maybe even help them realize what they want to be when they grow up.
 

Hey, Theatre East-ers, we want to know:  

What is the most profound effect—immediate or delayed—that theatre (whether as theatre-maker or audience) has had on your life? Let us know in the comments.

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The Wonder of Theatre

from Todd Eric Hawkins, Managing Director 

For my 12^th Birthday, my family took me to see The Man of La Mancha at the University of Oklahoma. It was the first time I experienced live theatre. I remember very few details about the events that led up to stepping into the lobby of the theater, but from that moment on everything is etched into memory.

The theater was the most beautiful place I had ever been. The red carpeted lobby that curved around the back of the theater, the chandeliers that hung majestically above my head as we waited to be seated. There was an excitement in the air. I watched as people began to fill the lobby, I listened as they reconnected with friends and talked about their lives and the people they knew in common.
 
When we entered the theater, my Grandmother asked me to find our seats as she handed me the ticket stubs. I walked up the side of the aisle looking for the letter E and then walked along the long curved row of seats until I found the numbers on the tickets. The crowd was pouring into the theater as we sat down. As they entered, the noise from the lobby became a whisper. The kind of hushed speech I heard at church on Sunday mornings. 

As the lights began to dim and the orchestra started to play, I was overcome with a sensation that I had never felt before. I felt as though an electrical current was shooting through my body. My Grandmother would later recall that at that moment I sat on the edge of my seat and stayed there for the entire performance, as if I was trying to “be up there with them.” 

Whatever I thought I wanted to do when I grew up before that night vanished from my 12 year-old mind. I was being summoned to the theatre. 

It would be 14 years before I experienced that sensation again so fully, the day I arrived in New York City for the first time. 

I flew into LaGuardia Airport filled with all of the stories of danger that my parents had instilled me. As the cab crossed the Triborough Bridge and headed down the FDR, I thought it was the noisiest, dirtiest city.  Why would anyone choose to live here? Then the cab turned off of 50^th Street onto Broadway and Times Square came into view. Suddenly, I was home. 

I spent that evening ignoring my parents’ advice and walking the streets of Times Square, stopping to read each billboard and picturing my name in lights. I passed Tommy, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Phantom of the Opera, and Angels in America. 

The following day I had an audition for several regional theaters through my college program and I had purchased a ticket to a show—my first Broadway show—for after the audition to celebrate my success. A success that would unfortunately never happen, not the way I had imagined anyway. 

I performed my monologue from Division Street the next day for a panel of two judges. In order to go forward to the actual audition you had to receive a yes from both judges; I got only one. I was devastated. 

That night I drug myself to the theater to see Cyrano: The Musical. I took my seat and waited for the show to begin. The lights dimmed and the overture began. Suddenly, as the music began to swell the name Cyrano began to be written on the scrim as if it were being hand written by Cyrano himself. The signature ended with a long stroke of the pen across the surface as the scrim began to rise. Suddenly, I was no longer a bitter and depressed 26 year old, I was 12 again. 

The power of theatre is that it has the ability to uphold, tear apart, and reassemble how the viewer thinks, feels, and, in some cases, behaves. Theatre has always acted as a bumper in my life, continually pushing and steering me on my journey and shaping me into the person I am today. 

I proudly accepted the role of Managing Director at Theatre East as a way to make sure that experiences like mine are available for others. Together we will work to provide a platform for our community, allowing them to experience the power of theatre that changed my life.

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