Another Op’nin, Another Show
Tonight is first dress rehearsal for “Spinning Into Butter” and I can already feel the adrenaline starting to build. We’ve been rehearsing this puppy since February and we are ready for an audience. Ready like a well-trained military unit for a little bit of shock and awe. Lock and load. Put that baby on full rock and roll.
The military metaphor is intentional. We are fighting a war for the audience’s thoughts and emotions. This play is extremely demanding of the actors from an emotional standpoint, the subject being racism. Casts in plays like this one tend to bond the way soldiers do in combat. At the end of the run, no one will want to let go. No one will want to say goodbye. No one will want to face the fact that we won’t be seeing each other every night.
Some of the friendships made during this production will endure. But we’re all actors. We’ll be going on to another show, another platoon. We’ll be bonding with a new gang of troupers. We’ll be preparing for another thespic battle.
This production has been a particular pleasure for me. It’s always flattering when you are asked to do a show rather than having to audition. I have always been rather baby-faced and have had it up to here with playing the male ingénue. One of the gifts of age is that I finally get to play the bad guy once in awhile.
“Spinning Into Butter” is produced by the theatre department at Western Washington University. I am the only non-student in the bunch. It is a great treat to work with some amazingly talented collegians. Not only do they bring immense energy and dedication to the performance, but they drag the old fart along with them to new heights.
When I was in college the first time, back in the Silurian epoch, I was head and shoulders above most of the other actors. Hell, I had been on stage since I was three. I should have been pretty good. But I couldn’t have touched any of these kids in the production. They are confident and competent. They bring a maturity to their roles that I didn’t even dream of when I was that age.
I have had the pleasure to work with a couple of the local high school dramatics teachers, who often direct at the Bellingham Theatre Guild. They demand far more from their students that any teacher did when I was that age. As a result, they are turning out some remarkably polished performers who only get better when they go to college.
The kids took awhile to warm up to me, naturally enough, since I was an outsider and an old one, to boot. In the pressure-cooker environment of a theatrical production, that coolness didn’t last long. The kids may be regular party hearty collegians outside the theatre, but once onstage they are all business. We focused on that common goal, the winning of an audience. We laughed a lot and cried a bit along the way. We learned a lot from each other.
Come opening night, Wednesday, we are going to be all over that audience like stink on shit. They won’t have the chance of a Taliban in Texas. We’re gonna make ‘em laugh and cry and leave the theatre with something to think and argue about for a long time.
We’ll bask in the applause, far better than any drug I’ve ever experienced. But more, we will have gained the satisfaction of doing something eminently worthwhile: taking an audience to a place it’s never been before.
HOOWAH!
2:28:00 PM 
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