The Community, The Family

Me, directing Oz while comforting Toto

In 1999, my two oldest children were 7 and 5 and would accompany me to the grand Fuller Hall auditorium at St. Johnsbury Academy for rehearsals.

We were staging Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim's musical that stitches several fairy tales into a fabulously dark tapestry about princes and princesses and witches and dead cows and beanstalks. It's a celebrated and musically unyielding show that drives musicians and directors crazy for its level of difficulty. I loved being a part of it, for many reasons.

I had, just a couple years before, tried my hand at acting for the first time in "The Rainmaker" and was instantly thrust into a rare fraternity called community theater. I fell in love. With not just acting, but with everything to do with it. It was a clan, with its own language and its own set of rules and its own hierarchy of leadership and its own local history and its own grand universal mythology.

It was where one could go, no matter his role in real life, and feel as if he had an equal footing no matter his role in the production. The banker and the housewife became light designers and stage managers; the teenager and the retired chef became set builders and sound engineers; the politician and the newspaperman became actors and producers. It allowed us the chance to become absorbed, naked of our day skins, into this warm light like unabashed children bathing together.

To be truthful, the biggest benefit for me is how theater revealed the folly of my fears. You've heard this story before. You've seen the movie. Perhaps, even, you have experienced it. Growing up, I was the kid in the shadowy corner. My self esteem stunted by the ridicule of peers for being short. A bullying that turned me inward and kept me gripped in the fist of palpable fear. Over the years, I have looked at my youth and seen it as a blessing in disguise. By being shuffled aside and forgotten, I was forced to play inside the mind which allowed me to exorcise demons onto the page and find my voice as a writer. A writer is a solitary person. He wields his tools alone. There is no need for peers to be happy and successful.

It wasn't until I was 30, however, and acted a part in a play that I discovered there was a tribe I belonged to. And from that point on, I've seen my courage grow; I have shrugged off my disdain of speaking in public; I have blown up the old anxieties that come with fearing failure.

Theater, for the most part, is the only experience I have had in which no matter how tired or frustrated I felt about a particular aspect of it, I always thirsted for it. I always looked forward to going to rehearsal. I always had withdrawals when it was over. I have laughed and shouted and cried on stage with people I've only known for months, and most of whom I still call my friends today. I can't think of a single experience that I can say that about.

Except family. Community theater, when it's working right, has the convivial spirit and community-as-family bonding of a Shaker barn-raising.

Speaking of family. I can think of no other activity than community theater in which real families can do something together. I learned this during that 1999 production of Into the Woods.

Fallon and Harrison, as I said, would come to rehearsals and sit in the auditorium and watch. They weren't there to be babysat. They came willingly and I loved them to be there. They were adopted by the cast. They were adored by the crew. They got a first-row seat to the making of a musical, and they had a million and one questions that I was thrilled to answer. I felt, more than at any time, like I was their hero.

Since then, they've seen nearly every show I've been in or directed. And while they don't participate in theater directly, I believe their exposure to it has in some small way opened them up to a broader sense of community and the arts and life. Something I did not have until I was 30. And their presence taught me that from then on, my family's involvement with me was as important to me as my own involvement.

Today, I sit here writing this just hours before The Wizard of Oz  hits the stage at our local community theater.  A show I directed. In it, my wife Corrine and two of our youngest children will perform along side a cast of 70 others and supported by a crew of nearly 30. Folks who are acting for the first time. Folks who are acting with their son or daughter. Folks who have dedicated their work to the memory of someone who died. Folks who do it for their own reasons, all of which really is about being involved in something that makes them feel included. Accepted. Important.

That's 100 people of every damn walk of life.

People I now love and who I can add to my growing family.

One that started in a musty town hall in Lyndonville, Vermont when a group of oddly different people asked me to join their family.

And in so doing, slayed the dragon of my youth.