Back in ye ole College Days, I was deep in the cult of student theater. With a robust slate of completely run student theater companies, there were not many weekends at Northwestern where Wildcats couldn’t choose between multiple plays, dance shows, or improv. We used to brag that more students attended student theater than went to football games. I never confirmed the metrics, but I won’t let it stop me from perpetuating the rumor. Being Top Dog gave us a badge of honor. Which is what all punk, do-it-yourself theater really needs. Nothing was more fuck-the-system then the late night 11 pm shows. Especially the ones in Shanley Pavilion.
Shaley Pavilion was a dump. But it was our dump. And a fire hazard. At one time, Shanley was an ROTC barracks, before it the theater kids started squatting in it. Like many other intimate theater spaces, it was just an empty room painted black that gave space for possibility. Everything that was anything happened at Shanley. It housed triumph and was a receptacle for creative diarrhea. And in between the highs and lows, a gallon of flat black paint.
There was a path that led from one of its four doors past the library, southeast toward the theater department. The distance between them was a mere 1/2 mile at best, but the two buildings couldn’t have been farther apart.
There were two classes of theater geeks - the ones who were in with the cool kids at The Theater Department, and then the real cool kids who despised them. Shocking no one, I put my lot in with the later class.
We were the pirates with patchouli oil who were not as ‘stock,’ who either didn’t have booming theater voices, or were not as classically good looking, or both. We also took a lot more drugs. And were diversified in our collective drug use. And we had it in for the department darlings - those debutantes, swashbucklers in tights, and clowns who lacked teeth. It was their names that would appear on the cast lists, again and again.
I used to think it was cruel the way the professors would come out at a certain time and post call back lists, or cast lists on a wall adjacent to the lobby for all of us to see. We would know in advance when that time would be and assemble before hand to wait for our fate to arrive.
We were told it was done this way to prepare us for the reality of rejection for a life in the theater. I used to think it was just cruel. But I have come to see the whole charade as fantasy.
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