Julie Doud, a community theatre actress and TVT veteran, wrote this post right after closing night of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” We can only sympathize with her despair, as the bittersweet moment of closing night is inevitable. We can only look forward to the next audition, though! (Which, in our case, happens to be July 19th and 20th, for “Arsenic and Old Lace.”)
Play Withdrawal. The symptoms? It’s generally characterized by an aching emptiness and lack of purpose and direction in your life as well as a persistent need to express yourself through song, though no one cares to listen. It sometimes presents with a pathetic lack of one-liners, side-conversations, and random song snatches in your day-to-day living. You may find you have no more need for glue-on eyelashes, tights or heels. Most likely you will encounter a pile of useless props and costumes sitting in your car waiting to be sadly unpacked and re-shelved, never to live again in the way they have so recently been animated. Never before have golf clubs or a stuffed animal chipmunk seemed so depressing. One day you are a creator, a performer, a risk-taker and the next you are no more… you are a civilian… a housewife, a businessman, a high school student, perhaps…. but actor no more. We in the industry call it play withdrawal.
Theatre is by its nature ethereal… a delicate, evanescent thing… lovely and gone too soon. Individuals venture from their places of comfort and gather together to CREATE. They pour their hearts, minds, bodies, energies and time into the endeavor. They develop a sense of team and a sense of place and a thousand different intertwining connections between their characters and between their real selves. They think deep thoughts about identity and human connection. They create a home for themselves as a group at the theatre. They tell a story. They breathe life into words, and they do it night after night until the world they’ve created suddenly comes crashing to a close.
Minutes later the theatre looks like a ghost town, depleted of all the myriad things that have accumulated through the recent weeks of play-making… you may see a crumpled program tumbleweed blowing across the carpeted green room floor until a helpful crew member deposits it in a trash bin. The show that was so full of life the hour before is no more. It has been dismantled and can’t be put back together. Though expected, it still constitutes a deeply felt tragedy of sorts. Truly there’s nothing for our wounds, though time does seem to lessen the aching. Other shows on the horizon help… but we know it’s not the same. The world will never be the same. Those relationships we’ve made are memories now – they will never truly exist the same way again. Irreparable.
Of course, we’ll embrace those we have learned to love in the course of the play when we see them at the theatre again… and we’ll hope in our secret hearts the bonds we formed were real. We know, of course, new memories and connections will be created next time… and from the barren theatre will arise new life, new worlds, new stories. It will be glorious! And yet we bitterly remember, those future shows will have their closings too…
2016-05-25 11:17:33
You must be logged in to post a comment.