Theater 1.0

Michael Austin

We come here and sit in the dark, as much to be enlightened as to be entertained.

Nothing wrong with being entertained. In my lifetime of theatergoing, I have been cheered and charmed by countless productions. But the most memorable productions leave me ruminating about something I heard or saw on stage, long after the house lights come up. Theater, at its best, can teach us something about ourselves, or the larger world. Even when we’re not looking for it.

I was just a kid, maybe nine, roaming the safe back yards of the next street over, looking for kids to toss a baseball with, or pretend to ready a spacecraft for landing, or rustle cattle.

I found my kindred spirits on that hot summer day, and when we were done readying or rustling, or following our imaginations to some other place, they all ran home for lunch. Soon, a few other kids approached me. They were putting on a play later that day, at three o’clock, and they were trying to fill seats. I told them I’d be there.

After a lunch of my own, I told my mother I needed to know when it was three, because I had somewhere to be. Hours ticked away, and eventually she let me know it was time.

Out I went, across our street, through the yards of neighbors and over to the house where the play was about to begin. At the back door I was greeted formally by a kid who led me down wooden steps to the basement. I was the first to arrive so I had my pick of seats. A Dixie Cup of granola sat on each chair as a welcoming gift to the audience. It was cool in the basement, and comforting, a world away from the scorching heat outside.

Minutes went by, and more minutes—that window of time we now fill by silencing our phones, unwrapping our candies and reading Playbill—and when the curtain opened, I was still the only one in the audience. The show went on.

There were some laughs, I remember that. I can’t honestly say that I remember the storyline, or if there even was one, but I do recall being wholly entertained and satisfied. I had finished clapping and was into my second cup of granola when the three kids in the play came out to where I was sitting.

Apparently, lots of other kids had promised to come, but didn’t. “You said you would be here and you were,” one of the performers said to me. “You were the only one.”

I thought the three of them might lift me onto their shoulders and carry me out into the afternoon sun. The entire tiny ensemble was thanking me for following through, and although I was only a boy, with a mouthful of dry cereal and a strong desire for some fruit punch, the gravity of the moment was not lost on me. The concept of not doing what you said you would was new to me, and I walked home turning that idea around in my head.

Before that fateful matinee, I hadn’t known there was any other option. I hadn’t known you could say you were going to do something and then not do it. My little brain was still developing. I was still unjaded. I was too young to be spurious (or gracious), too inexperienced to glad-hand or make promises I couldn’t keep.  

In that flash of childhood, somewhere in the middle of a routine summer whose millions of other moments have long since been forgotten, I learned the importance not only of being true to my word, but of simply showing up. It applies to most things in life, I would later learn, but in the theater it’s everything. No audience, no show. We show up, you and I, and we learn things, even as we’re being entertained, even when the lessons don’t play out on stage.