Live theaters are strange places. Their purpose is to create the unreal. Theater people take this idea to heart, both on and off the stage. The balance between what is real and what is fake, the boundaries between propriety and impropriety--they are somehow blurrier here than in most places.
In particular, a renovated Vaudeville theater is a creepy place to work. Ventriloquist dummies may as well lay in animated disrepair behind every corner because you’re scared of them anyway. Freak shows may still wait in medical mystery horror in the kitchen because you think you can see their insane scratches on the wall.
The children’s theater in my town needed more space about twenty years ago. An old Vaudeville theater, which had had later reincarnations as a movie theater in the ‘50s and the ‘70s, lay in its former screen queen glamour, gathering wrinkles.
Truth or rumor, it doesn’t really matter, sprung from this art nouveau theater’s shadowy past. Legend says that when the building was first being built, they wanted light stars made from tiny bulbs installed in the ceiling.An electrician, little eccentricities of theatrics in hand, climbed his way up the catwalk, but lost his footing and fell to his death. Later, in the time of abandonment, winters whipped into the unheated beauty. Homeless men were drawn to live within the theater’s unremembered glamor and one froze to death in the cold, his body left to rot in the unused space until the renovation. Both unknown men allegedly haunt the place. Haunting of the mind. The place is earthed in more mystery and myth than any other place I’d ever spent a considerable amount of time. And we all know that this kind of spookiness attracts kooks. And/or, of course, actors.
I worked there as an arts administration intern the summer after my freshman year of college. The lively cast of characters kept me entertained, if not intellectually stimulated through the summer. It was like a string of vaudeville acts—the first—he seduces! he divorces! So many women for this single man! would be followed by the next—he adapts children’s books! he makes shit as an actor, but probably is lucky because he’d make less as a playwright! See this multi-talented man in action! They were all looking for an audience and I seemed to have a Freudian couch by my desk. The actors were looking for another stage to tell their tales and came to me as I entered data into Excel spreadsheets and told me exorbitant tales of waiting tables. The more practical of the bunch—the publicity people, the management, the set designers—were making some more money, but they came and did a song and dance about how sad it was they couldn’t follow their acting passions.
I don’t know if I’ll ever spend time again in a theater. Hopefully not. There is something out of time there, out of touch. This is what makes live theater possible, I think. I learned that theaters are places of magic, mystery, a little bit of fear, but over everything, there is a bit of sadness, too.