It
all started when I was in high school—Hattiesburg High School, Hattiesburg,
Mississippi, 1960. Everyone was encouraged to join some kind of school club or
activity, 4-H, Junior Kiwanis, Young Republicans, debate team or something. I
chose Sock and Buskin, the drama club. We never did any drama. I can’t remember
if we ever even talked about it. The reason I picked that club was the faculty
advisor was a former Miss Mississippi. Every boy in my class and possibly quite
a few of the girls had a gigantic crush on her.
The
only thing the club ever did was to cover a convertible with toilet paper
flowers and ride in the homecoming parade.
Fast
forward ten years. I’m applying for a job teaching art at a school in Clarkton,
Missouri, population 1,207 in 2017. Lord knows what it was back then. I got the
job. When I met with the principal for the first time, he said, “I see here on
your application that you were in the drama club.”
“Yes
sir, I was.”
“Well,
how would you like to direct the school play? We’ll pay you an extra $200.” (equal to $1,321 today according to what I could find on Google)
Oh
yeah, I was all in for that. Never mind that I had never directed a play or even
been in a play. Except . . . oh, wait, I played one of the dwarfs in Snow
White in the first grade. I almost forgot about that. I not only had no
theater experience at the time, I hadn’t even seen more than four or five plays
in my life. Naturally, I said, “Yes sir, I’d love to do that.”
The
play was some stupid teenage comedy about a bunch of boys dressing up as girls
and crashing a girls-only spend-the-night party. Whoever chooses the plays—most
likely a committee of parents and teachers—had already ordered scripts.
I
held auditions in the gymnasium and cast everybody who showed up. Everyone who
didn’t get cast as a named character was put in the ensemble. I told them to
hang around on stage and pretend they were talking to other cast members.
The
cast was as skeptical as I was, and from the first day of rehearsal they
started improvising. Most of the improvised lines were better than what was in
the scripts, so I’d say, “Yeah. Let’s keep that.” Other than letting the
students rewrite the play, I can’t remember what I did by way of rehearsal. But
the play was a hit. The audience laughed hysterically. Afterwards, one of the
parents who helped picked the play told me it was the best play ever done at
Clarkton High School and said, “I hope you can direct our play every year.”
Well,
I didn’t do that because they didn’t hire me back, not as a director and not as
an art teacher. That’s a whole different story.
Let’s
fast forward another decade. By then, I had seen a little more than four or
five plays. Maybe as many as ten total, mostly Off-Broadway and
Off-Off-Broadway when I was in New York. And then we moved back home to
Mississippi where my nine-year-old son got cast as one of the Lost Boys in a
local production of Peter Pan, and he fell in love with theater. From
then on, he was a theater kid all the way through high school and college, and
I went to see as many of his plays as I could.
In
about 2003, I got a part-time temporary job as an assistant features editor at
The News Tribune. The job lasted nine months. And at the end of that time my
editor asked if I would be willing to write theater reviews. She had no idea
how little I knew about theater but trusted I could do it. I managed to fake it
while I learned. Since that beginning, I have written something more than a
thousand theater reviews, and I feel like I’m beginning to get the hang of it. It’s
been a great learning experience, and I’ve made many wonderful friends in the
theater community. I so look forward to when live theater can start back.
