October 2009

The Tour

This essay was first published in Athens Food and Culture October 2009 and is Copyright Will Leamon.

One of those intriguing and downright mystical parts of Theatre is the building itself. Ask anyone who has done a few shows and they will tell you tales of the packed green room, an empty house or walking the boards for the first time. A theatre is a purpose built building that can hold some of the most advanced technology in the world. On the other hand it is always old in that it was specifically built to continue a tradition that spans thousands of years. If you consider this confluence you can begin to understand how a mix of concrete, stone, metal and wire can provoke such passionate and heartfelt emotions in people of all walks of life. So now, dear reader, allow me to give you a tour of those places you can't see when seated in the house.

It may seem a little odd but the best place to begin is the stairs. While not all theatres have stairs most of them do and for some of us they are an absolute terror. I have many memories (and more to come) of hauling heavy, unruly and downright ungainly set pieces up and down stairs. It is a reminder that, at its heart, theatre is a very physical art. While much thought and reflection enhance a show there can be no theatre without action! You realize this in extreme clarity when you try to haul Mrs. Lovett's massive oven up four flights of stairs.

Let's shift over to a more pleasant location. That mythical place known as the Green Room. The Green Room is whatever part of the theatre where the cast and crew congregate before, during and after a show. During show week the green room becomes your second home. It buzzes and hums with the chatter of dozens excited individuals. A most pleasing laughter can erupt in the green room at any moment. It has a unique atmosphere that can only be achieved when people share a common goal with a rare dedication. It's also an electrifying place on the night of a show. The clock on the wall grows steadily larger as it clicks the seconds away before the lights come up and you enter one of the most terrifying and exhilarating experiences in your life.

Let's fly all the way over to the exact opposite end of the building to a place hardly anyone (in the show or not) ever gets to see – the booth! The booth is the nerve center of all the technology in a theater. It was the first place I honestly learned to love theater. That booth was at EB Mell Auditorium at good old Clarke Central High School. At the tender age of 14, I scrambled up the ladder into the booth and met what would become an old friend – the lighting board. Now any board with as many buttons and faders would have excited a nervously geeky kid such as myself but when Dave Bashim (my mentor that night) grabbed a fader and wiggled it I was shocked and amazed as some hidden light very far away winked on and off. It was then that I realized the sheer amount of wires, man-power and technology that is poured into a theater to make a show happen. All that effort to make people forget their troubles for a couple of hours instead of say warfare, politics or any of the world's other woes helped instill in me a faith in humanity I now wonder if many others share. These days when I make a rare visit to the booth to talk to Matt our lead engineer I am typically greeted with the “Bahs!” and gurgles of Matt's newborn son Eli. To see that adorable baby with his dad amidst all that wiring and technology strengthens that faith every time.

Finally there's the stage. Now many of you have seen it from the seats but it becomes a completely different place when you're standing up there. It's a cauldron of emotions both good and bad. For example, last summer I played Duke Vincentio in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. So it's opening night, Act I Scene I – The Duke enters and... freezes. I'm absolutely stock still with no idea what ANY of my lines are. Hundreds of eyes are on me and absolute silence reigns until someone... coughs. That snapped me back to life and we got through the scene somehow but let me tell you that was one of the most awful experiences in my life. It shook my performance for the whole show. But here's the sticky thing about the stage – the next night I came back and nailed Act I Scene 1! That's the most important thing the stage can teach you – no matter how awful your fears may be they are never as bad in reality. You learn a kind of confidence from those terrible experiences that you can take with you wherever life may lead.

I hope you've gathered from this tour that Theatre is an intense experience. In this modern world we seem to shrink from intensity as soon as it crops up and the result has led us to a kind of stagnation that is hard to describe but I think we all agree is there. If you find yourself wanting to actively reject that creeping malaise I would definitely suggest starting by entering a theater!