By:
Meghan K.
If you
know anything about me, you’ll know that one of my passions is musical theatre.
Ask any one of my friends and they’ll back me up. I am genuinely obsessed with
performing. Ever since my first production almost four years ago, I’ve kept up
a pretty consistent rehearsal schedule. There’s never been a gap of more than a
year between my shows. I plan a lot of my activities around whether or not I
can continue to do musical theatre alongside them. I’m always either coming
down off the rush of one show or preparing for auditions for the next. My
catchphrase has l become “I can’t, I have rehearsal.” But despite how in love I
am with being onstage, I actually almost quit musical theatre after my most
recent production.
“Wait,
wait, wait!” you say. “Back up! If you’re so enamored with musical theatre, why
did you almost quit?”
This the
story I’m going to tell, and we’re going to start at the very, very beginning,
back when I first started acting.
In 2014,
I decided to audition for my community theatre company’s production of A Seussified Christmas Carol (which, by
the way, was exactly what it says on the tin) and break into the theatre world.
I had been in love with the idea of acting since I first started going to plays
with my Girl Scout troop back in elementary school. |Everyone onstage seemed to
be having the time of their lives and unlike in T.V. and movies, the audience
was right there cheering the actors on.
The idea
of acting was intimidating, especially considering the fact that I’d never
performed before but I still went for the audition and A Seussified Christmas Carol was everything I’d ever dreamed. Our
cast of eight quickly became a family. I found a space where I was completely
and utterly myself and I had an amazing time making the audience laugh. It was
the most thrilling experience of my life. I decided that from that moment on, I
was an actor.
Almost
four years later, I was rehearsing for another Dr. Seuss-based production, Seussical but I was far from the girl
who’d auditioned for A Seussified
Christmas Carol. The girl who decided that she was going to keep performing
forever and ever and ever. in fact, I was starting to wonder if I really
belonged in theatre at all.
See, the
four plays between A Seussified Christmas
Carol and Seussical were all been
amazing experiences but they’d also showed me the darker side of theatre. They
showed me how scary auditions can be and how going in unprepared will always
come back to bite me. They showed me how hard it is to combine singing,
dancing, and acting and that it’s even harder to combine them and make that
mixture beautiful. They showed me that by performing I was putting myself in a
very vulnerable position and that sometimes what my director tells me isn’t
going to jive with what I feel is right. And ultimately I have to follow their directions.
They showed me that sometimes it’s hard to leave things at the door and not let
my life affect my acting in a negative way. Some of those lessons I learned the
hard way, through various awkward and slightly mortifying experiences that I
would’ve rather forgotten.
By the
time we started rehearsals for Seussical,
my view of theatre had changed. No longer did I see theatre as a place where I
was completely myself, where the toughest scenes were fun, and where my cast
members and I were making something beautiful. Instead, my mind was wrapped up
in singing louder, getting the choreography perfect, scrutinizing my own every move
so that I wouldn’t throw off the people on stage with me, and trying (while
failing) to hide all of my emotions for the sake of “looking professional.”
Instead of enjoying theatre, I had turned it into yet another source of
anxiety.
This all
came to a head one night at rehearsal. We were singing through the entire show
when I tripped over a harmony, something I do a lot, and found myself falling
into a downward spiral of anxiety. “You’ve
messed up again, Meghan,” the nasty little voice inside my head was saying.
“You can’t do that so close to showtime.
You’ve got two weeks until you have to sing all this music on stage. You can’t
keep messing up.”
So as
soon as we went on break, I got out of the room as fast as I could and went to
sit in the stairwell until I calmed down. But as I was trying to convince
myself that the harmonies really weren’t that big of a deal and that I could go
home and work on them, I started thinking about something else; if I was this
anxious over something so minor, maybe I should quit theatre.
As
rehearsal was wrapping up, I mentioned this to a friend of mine. This friend
turned to me, looked at me like I was crazy, and then asked a simple question:
“Does theatre make you happy?”
I didn’t
even have to think; I simply responded, “This is the happiest I’ve ever been.”
“I think
you’ve answered your own question.”
This
response gave me a lot to think about when I went home that night. Was it
possible that maybe I’d reacted prematurely and maybe I still belonged in
theatre after all? Was it possible that the monsters in my head were lying to
me?
As we
wrapped Seussical, another friend
mentioned something to me that I’d completely ignored.
“When
you’re on stage, it’s like you’re a different person,” she told me. “You light
up when you have an audience, but the instant you get off the stage, you fall
victim to your own anxieties. I don’t know what happens, but it’s kind of
scary.”
Suddenly,
I had an answer to the question I’d been asking since I started Seussical.
I don’t
know how it happened, but somewhere between my first show and my most recent
one, I lost sight of why I’d joined theatre. I became so consumed with anxiety
and trying to be perfect that I completely forgot how much performing had made
me smile. The purpose of musical theatre is to tell a story, to make the
audience feel something, to make people happy, to make them laugh and to want
to sing and dance with you. Part of the magic of performing with a live
audience is how human the story becomes. Because of all the nasty inner voices
in my head, I’d forgotten what I was doing on the stage.
The
truth is that I am on the stage to feel the rush of adrenaline as we finish a number
and the audience applaud. I’m there to find myself falling into a character.
The big
thing I took away from this experience is that you can’t let your fears and
anxieties keep you from doing something you love. I nearly quit musical
theatre, one of the places where I’ve felt the safest, because my anxiety was
telling me that I no longer belonged there, even though my gut instinct was to
stay and find the spark I’d lost. So the only thing I can tell you if you’re
facing a decision like this, is to go with what your gut is telling you. You
may find that you still have something to learn and something to gain and that
you haven’t lost your love for it after all.
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