THEATER

NO SMALL PARTS

long live the liberation of high school thespians

By Chloe Vuillermoz

Each spring, my high school theatre troupe hosted an award show and we’d hand out gold-painted rocks to the winners. These were The Stonys. We followed the lead of every award show, aping the professionals in the slyest ways possible: Best Lead Actress (highly contentious); Best One-Act Play (usually obvious); and of course Best Chorus Member (both incredibly tender and the biggest slam). I got that last one senior year after playing “The Three Boobed Lady” in the musical Sideshow. I probably won the award for my overall commitment to being there, but I should have won for standing on the back platform after the finale of each show, weeping alongside the rest of the cast. Even if my tears were invisible to the audience, I was committed. I earned that award. In exchange for my teenage mountain of devotion, I got a fist-sized rock.

I’ve kept this rock for eight years and it’s been weighing down my mother’s moving boxes ever since. For those unfamiliar with the mundanity of Colorado infrastructure, I think it came from the courtyard of an apartment building or a shopping center marking a highway’s ending or a municipality’s beginning. We picked them up, painted them, and sharpied our awards onto their gleaning surfaces, and by doing so made them precious. The significance of these transformations from the ordinary into the exceptional is the central metaphor of high school theatre.

I bring up my special rock on first dates and have it on my CV when applying for positions that require remarkable charisma and a “positive” mental attitude. For me having won this rock is way better than having been crowned prom queen and yet my category still stings in the way it did then, always the ensemble-bridesmaid and never the bride-lead or something like that. The duality of applauding my best friends as they receive standing ovations while trying to find my standing in the background, well, it’s a tough lesson on the idea of a missed opportunity and then the embarrassment of ever having cared at all. And you know, I still care.

A Whole Foods in Colorado

When I was 19, I worked at my hometown Whole Foods and it was terrible. I bagged items, scanned boxes, and made sure that shoppers could see the products the corporation wanted them to grab off the shelves. To this day, I still am put off by the grocery store smell and what it meant to my development, as a worker under Capitalism and a human. There I was in the same place I’d gone to high school, unknowingly participating in another cyclical rite of passage, the work crush, which blossoms out of desperation, or need, or boredom, who knows? No matter its motivation, it’s still a bad idea that any adult who’s lived could tell you to avoid, or at least not to indulge in.

At age 19, this indulgence took the form of the Whole Foods meat department and trust me, I wish that I had placed my sexual energy anywhere other than where the beef was stored, but I was young and theatre deprived. I was always at the meat counter, hungry for a glance, the glance of a man who had never missed a Phish concert in his life. He stood behind the counter with his hair netted beard and in my dreams, he was simultaneously the one straight guy in my theater troupe and totally into me. I don’t think this misplaced desire is so dissimilar from what happens in high school. Of course, 19 is scarcely on the other side of the hump of graduation and the stifling process of growing any kind of self-awareness. I needed shame, but all I had was desire. Is this sort of humiliation a rite of passage that I am grateful for? No, but I do think it’s part of what it means to be a child pretending to be an adult. Though a script wasn’t handed to me, I slipped into the role easily, not yet aware of how ridiculous it was or, truthfully, I was.

The shame exists in my memories, too. Is this a growing pain? The natural process of adolescence peaking and then halting? I would like to now bury it somewhere boring and desolate, so as to never come across it again. Though of course when I was just two years off my big and painful win, I was still stuck in the shadow of the cast list. “Pick me! Like me!” I pleaded with my crushes, doing a sort of mating song and dance, as though they were casting directors. What does high school theater do that brackets shame from appearing? It’s lurking behind the curtain perhaps, but not backstage. Shame is awful and pervasive, but somehow high school theatre falls immune to it. What does theatre do that puts it at bay and temporarily holds it off so wonderful things can happen? Well, let me put it this way, shame dies when sixteen-year-olds convert factory rocks into fabulous awards.

That's me in Cabaret, taking a sailor away to...

I look at my high school theatre experiences as precious, but not impossible to recreate and revisit. It’s actually pretty simple: look up a high school production near you, buy a ticket for $8.50, and show up. There’s nothing better than seeing children pretend to be drunk, smoking cigarettes, and marking their faces with black lines to age themselves all the way to 92. Children reveal their innocence by playing adults and it’s endearing. Look at them play prostitutes and heroin addicts and you will see the return of innocence and sincerity. As an adult viewer, this can toe the line of discomfort. I know how fun it is to lure a man into my bedroom, just to have the door lead backstage to a corridor lit only by glow-in-the-dark tape. This sort of juxtaposition of experiences is what high school theatre allows for. It isn’t real life, but teenage actors play it as if it were and that’s glorious.

Sit in the audience, lose your critical adult cynicism, and really watch the kids. I promise you will be playing right alongside them. I’ve been giddy with delight watching two princes belt Sondheim’s “Agony” and take on characters so over the top and gaudy that they never could do this in their everyday lives. In a high school musical, everything is done with absolute intention. High school is not a space where self-expression is celebrated, but somehow theatre remains one of the few opportunities where these repressed, hormone-addled kids can take something like dancing in spoon and knife costumes seriously. This is a space in which you are allowed to “act” without irony.

There's no irony in Rent!

Theater is socially sanctioned, sometimes even celebrated by the student body, and yet the whole culture is built on a precarious and strange system of getting away with it; of course, depending on what you think it is. But believe me, whatever it is, it needs to be gotten away from. Walk the halls of a high school, after hours, during the week of auditions for the spring musical and this is what you may find: empty classrooms erupting with 16 bars of a song from The Last Five Years or Something’s Rotten. You will overhear seniors warning freshmen of the brutality of the casting room, offering advanced condolences by way of condescension. “Oh sweetie, have you ever even sung with live accompaniment before?” Then of course the cast list comes out, pinned to the bulletin board outside of the auditorium and all hell breaks loose. In that moment, dreams are both crushed and forged. There is some sort of life-lessons to be mulled over; that is, at least until the first rehearsal begins. This is when the students enter a unique space: amidst all their personal struggles to understand themselves, they are given the gift of trying out life in another role. On stage, they are born again.

Normally we don’t applaud the confusion between the stage and real life, but in high school theatre it is practically a necessity. Married roles (The Baker and the Baker’s Wife) often lead to offstage romances. Conversely, high school actors get a chance to see themselves outside of the narratives that have been given to them by their parents, community, and society at large. In the rehearsal process, young adults start to practice living as who they wish to become. For example, every single one of my close friends from high school came out during the spring of our junior year after we put on an uncensored production of Rent. And still we couldn’t quite say it out loud, but in soft whispers backstage, we admitted to one another that, like the characters we portrayed, we were different too. A friend I’ve known since then and I were discussing what components were at work during that time and we came up with this: that at 15 we were allowed to express ourselves and that allowed us to be less self-aware and yet strangely truly aware of who we might be. I think that’s a beautiful thing.

Be who you are and aren't

Recently I saw a high school production of Shrek the Musical. It was awesome, despite the spotty sound, the lights struggling to find actors, and any number of missed cues. But what made it wonderful was that Princess Fionna and Dragon were incredible singers and Shrek was played by a young man who nailed his Scottish accent as if he were Mike Meyers’ long lost son. But the real pleasure was the way the entire cast went for it, the enthusiasm they had for every minute of the production. It’s an excitement that professionals can only dream of. This is not a world of irony, but one of love and the opportunity to surpass yourself, your problems, and whatever other issues you might be struggling with.

The production was more than endearing, but what really got me was a moment in the second act when the cast let their freaks flag fly, playing misfits like Pinocchio, the Ginger Bread Man, and the Three Little Pigs. The kids burst on stage singing about embracing the thing about themselves that sets them apart from everyone else. This is what high school theatre does better than any other art form: it produces the real out of the artificial. The line between the fantasy world they were in melted into the world we all live in, and I along with many others cried at the wonderful possibility that one day these kids might live full and happy lives. I wanted to tell them that if they wait, there will be moments like these: the SAP center after the San Jose Sharks finally win, the blissful cheers from Zorhan Mamdani’s victory party, and all the moments where we lose adult irony and realize that we are part of a world capable of great and unironic joy. These moments should be cherished and while it can never be this way again, it certainly leads to other joys and moments of true bliss.

Why not have some fun?

Participating in high school theater is more difficult and more impressive than starring in an academy-award winning film. I anticipate some push back on such a declaration, but allow just a bit of leash. In order to perform in a high school production, you need to be a high school student. High school lasts only four years. So, within four years students have the chance to gravitate towards the auditorium and despite their chemically induced lack of self-assurance or awareness, audition for a role or join the crew. This would be hard for most people of any age, as stage fright is all-encompassing and contagious. You need some naïveté and so it is extremely important that students are unaware of what it means to take on a character, suspend one’s sense of belief, or just to believe that you can play a character, any character.

So, what makes this more impressive than a role in The Godfather is that this performance relies on high school being synonymous with the world, and of course that world ends for all of us in one way or another. Look, I can’t answer all these existential questions, but I do know the window of high school theatre is very, very small and if you miss that opening, that’s it, the window seals shut. Time frightens us, it baffles us, and does in fact, work against us in the long term and so if you’re afraid you missed your moment, well then go to a high school show. There, for two hours inside of that theatre, you might just find your way back, back to when you were both everything and nothing at once.

©The CCA Arts Review and Chloe Vuillermoz