How the Performing Arts May Have Saved My Life: A Hyperbole-Tinged Essay on 29 Years in Theater
This year, Alleman High School very generously bestowed upon me a beautiful plaque upon my induction into the Alleman High School Drama Hall of Fame. My name will also be added to a plaque in the lobby of the Tracey Spaeth Auditorium.
Of course, when Linda McGraw notified me way back in July that I was to be this year's inductee, I thought to myself, "wow... wait, we leapfrogged some people. How did we get to me already?!!"
In Linda's very gracious and sincere induction speech, she made it known that it was richly deserved and overdue. So this cancelled out use of my lead-off joke. "Are you sure I've earned this yet? Hall of Fame induction is typically a lifetime achievement award! And I'm only 40!!! If I manage to get to like eighty, and I'm still able and spry enough to be in plays, I may be only halfway through my career!"
Instead I jumped right to sharing an anecdote about my mom taking me to see Hello, Dolly at Alleman High School when I was in 7th Grade. Lindsey Kane was Dolly Levi. Matt Rowe was Horace Vandegelder. I saw it with mom and my sister Carrie, then a freshman at Alleman. I poured over the program to learn the names of the actors. I remember Kory Cogdill was Cornelius. I remember Corey Creger was Barnaby. I remember members of the football team being in the wait staff. I remember seeing Kara DeDecker in the cast, who had helped out with the Alleman Music Theater Workshop that I attended the summer before.
Let me put it this way. Seeing Hello Dolly was the juncture where my twelve year old self said to himself, "I cannot wait to get to high school. I cannot wait to get to my freshman year so that I can show up for the auditions for the Fall Musical, and maybe get into the show so that I can start doing this kind of stuff.
Flash forward 28 years. I had four Alleman High School musicals under my belt, two winter plays, four variety shows, and had helped with set building or set painting with practically all of them. I had gone on to do shows at Augustana College, Quad City Music Guild, Genesius Guild, Playcrafter's Barn Theater, Richmond Hill Players, and Countryside Community Theater.
Alright, maybe my resume is long enough, I suppose, to get into my high school's Drama Club Hall of Fame.
Drama Club is where I went to make the friends I was proud to call friends in high school. It was where we had late night rehearsals in the bandroom. It was where we concocted the idea to put on a Christmas concert entirely on our own, rehearsing an hour later than the rehearsals for the Christmas mass rehearsals. Alleman was where I learned to do a New York accent during Guys and Dolls. Alleman was where I learned the Italian accent for Saturday, Sunday, Monday. It was where I colored my hair for the first time, having black spray put in to play the evil, conniving robber-baron, Windermere Hightower in The Curse of an Aching Heart. Drama Club is why I clean-shaved at age seventeen to pass off as a ten year old in a Brady Bunch sketch in the Variety Show my junior year. Drama Club is where I had my friend Melissa Sweeney bail me out after said Variety Show, when I got my car stuck on the embankment outside of Pizza and Subs after a cast party. Her uncle operated a tow truck. He came out at like 11 pm on a Saturday to hook up a chain and get me out of there.
And thanks to this experience, I've gotten to play parts I never would have dreamed I had the qualification to play. I was cast in Vintage Hitchcock earlier this year at Richmond Hill Players in Geneseo, Illinois. I played the role of Robert in "The Lodger," the villains Vladimir and The Professor in "Sabotage," and Richard Hannay in "The 39 Steps."
It was the morning of the Saturday performance that I was doing some canvassing for a political candidate out on Hubbell Road in East Moline near Stone's Apple Barn when I got cut off by an aggressive driver. He passed me in a no passing zone. On a hill. With a curve. He got out of his car, approached my window, and started cussing at me for driving slowly.
Now, after the event happened, I thought of colorful theatrical things I could have said to him. In the moment, I was tongue-tied. One of the things going through my brain was "I can't let myself get hurt. I can't hurl insults back at this guy and wind up in an altercation. I go on stage tonight. Just be cool, Greg."
Thankfully, he got done yelling at me about being on my phone (was not texting, was not making a call, was using it for an address on GPS), he got in his car and drove off. I knew that he was having an episode. It was obvious he was having a behavior. It may have been something else that happened in the day. I knew from my Arc training that he was acting out. All my Arc training taught me came in handy as well. Let him blow off his steam. He did. He left. I hope he manages to deal with these personal demons that pushed him over the line and into a melt down that could have gotten us injured.
Thank God I had Vintage Hitchock to keep me safe. Thank God I knew I couldn't take a fist through my window. I let him have the last word. I left in one piece.
And again, playing some vile, bitter, unsavory characters in Vintage Hitchcock was in some ways catharsis. It was a way for me to cope with my own inner demons. I had some emotions from the incident. I was able to project them in a healthy manner by way of playing the role of villains onstage. I was able to dispose of the negative energy.
And that, to come to the crux of it, is what theatre is all about. It builds a family. The family looks out for each other. It becomes a vehicle for dealing with that which is troubling you in your daily life.
Although, to be fair, once I got the negative energy out playing Vladimir and The Professor, I was tired. I was always tired when I got done playing a villain. I was always happy to get back to playing the character of Talbot, the British Inspector who gave marching orders to Mike Kelly's younger Detective, Ted Spencer, who was spying on the play's anti-hero, Verloc.
And then we got to go to the cast party at director Jonathan Grafft's house. Eat very delicious desserts. Fill up on crackers, cheese, and snacks. I chatted it up with Jonathan's son, Aidan, who has aspirations of becoming a teacher like me. I kind of just needed to stand around with people in a community of theater. I needed the levity of that group of supportive people. I could kind of pretend like the encounter with the road rage driver never happened. Or rack it up as an isolated outburst that he'd forget about, or at very least it'd cease to matter after so many days... and I could expunge the whole incident from my file. Fill in the space in my life with another title credit in the theater résumé.
The levity of a supportive group of theater people has definitely gotten me through a bumpy 2022. My dad had an angriogram and a stent put in this past fall, after a stress test revealed some arterial blockage. He'd been feeling under the weather, and we finally figured out why. As for my wife, Sara's dad, she has been getting updates from her mom, Linnea, about Edward's weightloss, diagnosis with an esophogeal cancer, and his subsequent treatment. I for one had a pre-cancerous mole removed this past summer. It came after a shave biopsy revealed the mole to be atypia. I was happy to go to Something Rotten rehearsal and work backstage following the shave biopsy. I was only too happy to escape into the world of make believe that Quad City Music Guild supplies by going to a rehearsal for Cinderella hours after having the surgery to remove the mole.
The Cinderella community was one of a kind. I am so very happy that I joined that show. It was diverse. It was talented. It was a broad cross-section of people. It was a unique and apt use of people's talents, moved around and casts to play to the actor's respective strenghts.
In any first rehearsal for a show, there are always going to be new people to meet. The community that is that production is convening for the first time on the very first day. Invarialy I am going to be a stranger to somebody. I am thinking to when I was in Children of Eden at Music Guild in 2001, when it was my first time appearing on that stage. I was only friends or acquaintances with about a half dozen people in the cast and crew at the time I arrived at that first rehearsal.
By the end of Children of Eden, everyone in the cast was at bare minimum an acquaintance. And many of them became what I consider to be lifelong friends.
Every Music Guild show since I have had a significant chunk of people involved whom I already know, come the first rehearsal night, from having worked with them in previous productions, or seen them onstage in previous experiences at Music Guild or beyond in the theater community. I knew people from Children of Eden, Augustana College, and Alleman High School when I did The Scarlet Pimpernel in 2002. I knew people from Pimpernel in Damn Yankees in 2004. I knew people from a mix of those shows from that point on. As for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in 2007, I had a bunch of kids and teenagers I had substitute taught in the Rock Island, Moline, and United Township school districts over the past two years. Same went for Meet Me in St. Louis in 2012.
So by the time we got to 2022, with my joining the cast of Cinderella, there was a very eclectic mix of people in the cast, comprised of longtime friends, relatively recent friends, and people I had yet to meet, but would like upon first impression at that very first rehearsal.
Cinderella was the unique circumstance where the cast burst into applause just because I walked into the room. Apparently Harold, the director, had set me up well with a good introduction before I arrived. I joined the cast late. I was invited to the cast by way of an e-mail, three months after the auditions. My schedule freed up, creating the opportunity for me to join the cast. At that particular moment in time, as I arrived to pay the assistant director my deposit for the script, and Harold introduced me in person, I felt a true sense of belonging. I had no doubt that I would keep caught up with the cast. Even as I'd be moonlighting as a backstage member of the crew on the June production of Something Rotten, I had faith that the acquaintances I had made at Music Guild, and the theater community of the Quad Cities wrought large, involved in the production staffs of each respective show would work in collaboration and conjunction with each other to allow me to navigate between the two productions and their overlapping rehearsal schedules, and allowing me to make optimum use of time as I ambulated between the two, at times attending portions of each rehearsal on the same night.
I had a similarly good experience with Vintage Hitchcock at Richmond Hill Players. The director, Jonathan Grafft, and his wife, Anne Keeney-Grafft, the stage manager, gave all of us actors a lot of breathing room to develop our parts. As it was the fall show, it overlapped with the school year. They were very accommodating for me when I had to arrive at rehearsal late due to travel from work. As I was pushing myself in directions I had never gone before, playing the aforementioned Russian terrorist and bombmaking professor, they gave me the right balance of guidance and free-reign. They set up an environment where all of us actors could build our skill sets and go to places with characters we had never gone before as actors. I think we all really grew.
So to come to the crux of this post, working on the shows that I have done this year kept me off the streets. They gave me new communities that developed into theater families. And in the case of giving me a show date, call time, meeting time, and places time, I knew that I had to keep my big mouth shut when confronted with a potentially dangerous person on Hubbell Road in East Moline, Illinois. The need to keep myself out of trouble to make the show thaat night was what prompted me to hold my tongue. The performing arts may just as well have saved my life.
Of course, when Linda McGraw notified me way back in July that I was to be this year's inductee, I thought to myself, "wow... wait, we leapfrogged some people. How did we get to me already?!!"
In Linda's very gracious and sincere induction speech, she made it known that it was richly deserved and overdue. So this cancelled out use of my lead-off joke. "Are you sure I've earned this yet? Hall of Fame induction is typically a lifetime achievement award! And I'm only 40!!! If I manage to get to like eighty, and I'm still able and spry enough to be in plays, I may be only halfway through my career!"
Instead I jumped right to sharing an anecdote about my mom taking me to see Hello, Dolly at Alleman High School when I was in 7th Grade. Lindsey Kane was Dolly Levi. Matt Rowe was Horace Vandegelder. I saw it with mom and my sister Carrie, then a freshman at Alleman. I poured over the program to learn the names of the actors. I remember Kory Cogdill was Cornelius. I remember Corey Creger was Barnaby. I remember members of the football team being in the wait staff. I remember seeing Kara DeDecker in the cast, who had helped out with the Alleman Music Theater Workshop that I attended the summer before.
Let me put it this way. Seeing Hello Dolly was the juncture where my twelve year old self said to himself, "I cannot wait to get to high school. I cannot wait to get to my freshman year so that I can show up for the auditions for the Fall Musical, and maybe get into the show so that I can start doing this kind of stuff.
Flash forward 28 years. I had four Alleman High School musicals under my belt, two winter plays, four variety shows, and had helped with set building or set painting with practically all of them. I had gone on to do shows at Augustana College, Quad City Music Guild, Genesius Guild, Playcrafter's Barn Theater, Richmond Hill Players, and Countryside Community Theater.
Alright, maybe my resume is long enough, I suppose, to get into my high school's Drama Club Hall of Fame.
Drama Club is where I went to make the friends I was proud to call friends in high school. It was where we had late night rehearsals in the bandroom. It was where we concocted the idea to put on a Christmas concert entirely on our own, rehearsing an hour later than the rehearsals for the Christmas mass rehearsals. Alleman was where I learned to do a New York accent during Guys and Dolls. Alleman was where I learned the Italian accent for Saturday, Sunday, Monday. It was where I colored my hair for the first time, having black spray put in to play the evil, conniving robber-baron, Windermere Hightower in The Curse of an Aching Heart. Drama Club is why I clean-shaved at age seventeen to pass off as a ten year old in a Brady Bunch sketch in the Variety Show my junior year. Drama Club is where I had my friend Melissa Sweeney bail me out after said Variety Show, when I got my car stuck on the embankment outside of Pizza and Subs after a cast party. Her uncle operated a tow truck. He came out at like 11 pm on a Saturday to hook up a chain and get me out of there.
And thanks to this experience, I've gotten to play parts I never would have dreamed I had the qualification to play. I was cast in Vintage Hitchcock earlier this year at Richmond Hill Players in Geneseo, Illinois. I played the role of Robert in "The Lodger," the villains Vladimir and The Professor in "Sabotage," and Richard Hannay in "The 39 Steps."
It was the morning of the Saturday performance that I was doing some canvassing for a political candidate out on Hubbell Road in East Moline near Stone's Apple Barn when I got cut off by an aggressive driver. He passed me in a no passing zone. On a hill. With a curve. He got out of his car, approached my window, and started cussing at me for driving slowly.
Now, after the event happened, I thought of colorful theatrical things I could have said to him. In the moment, I was tongue-tied. One of the things going through my brain was "I can't let myself get hurt. I can't hurl insults back at this guy and wind up in an altercation. I go on stage tonight. Just be cool, Greg."
Thankfully, he got done yelling at me about being on my phone (was not texting, was not making a call, was using it for an address on GPS), he got in his car and drove off. I knew that he was having an episode. It was obvious he was having a behavior. It may have been something else that happened in the day. I knew from my Arc training that he was acting out. All my Arc training taught me came in handy as well. Let him blow off his steam. He did. He left. I hope he manages to deal with these personal demons that pushed him over the line and into a melt down that could have gotten us injured.
Thank God I had Vintage Hitchock to keep me safe. Thank God I knew I couldn't take a fist through my window. I let him have the last word. I left in one piece.
And again, playing some vile, bitter, unsavory characters in Vintage Hitchcock was in some ways catharsis. It was a way for me to cope with my own inner demons. I had some emotions from the incident. I was able to project them in a healthy manner by way of playing the role of villains onstage. I was able to dispose of the negative energy.
And that, to come to the crux of it, is what theatre is all about. It builds a family. The family looks out for each other. It becomes a vehicle for dealing with that which is troubling you in your daily life.
Although, to be fair, once I got the negative energy out playing Vladimir and The Professor, I was tired. I was always tired when I got done playing a villain. I was always happy to get back to playing the character of Talbot, the British Inspector who gave marching orders to Mike Kelly's younger Detective, Ted Spencer, who was spying on the play's anti-hero, Verloc.
And then we got to go to the cast party at director Jonathan Grafft's house. Eat very delicious desserts. Fill up on crackers, cheese, and snacks. I chatted it up with Jonathan's son, Aidan, who has aspirations of becoming a teacher like me. I kind of just needed to stand around with people in a community of theater. I needed the levity of that group of supportive people. I could kind of pretend like the encounter with the road rage driver never happened. Or rack it up as an isolated outburst that he'd forget about, or at very least it'd cease to matter after so many days... and I could expunge the whole incident from my file. Fill in the space in my life with another title credit in the theater résumé.
The levity of a supportive group of theater people has definitely gotten me through a bumpy 2022. My dad had an angriogram and a stent put in this past fall, after a stress test revealed some arterial blockage. He'd been feeling under the weather, and we finally figured out why. As for my wife, Sara's dad, she has been getting updates from her mom, Linnea, about Edward's weightloss, diagnosis with an esophogeal cancer, and his subsequent treatment. I for one had a pre-cancerous mole removed this past summer. It came after a shave biopsy revealed the mole to be atypia. I was happy to go to Something Rotten rehearsal and work backstage following the shave biopsy. I was only too happy to escape into the world of make believe that Quad City Music Guild supplies by going to a rehearsal for Cinderella hours after having the surgery to remove the mole.
The Cinderella community was one of a kind. I am so very happy that I joined that show. It was diverse. It was talented. It was a broad cross-section of people. It was a unique and apt use of people's talents, moved around and casts to play to the actor's respective strenghts.
In any first rehearsal for a show, there are always going to be new people to meet. The community that is that production is convening for the first time on the very first day. Invarialy I am going to be a stranger to somebody. I am thinking to when I was in Children of Eden at Music Guild in 2001, when it was my first time appearing on that stage. I was only friends or acquaintances with about a half dozen people in the cast and crew at the time I arrived at that first rehearsal.
By the end of Children of Eden, everyone in the cast was at bare minimum an acquaintance. And many of them became what I consider to be lifelong friends.
Every Music Guild show since I have had a significant chunk of people involved whom I already know, come the first rehearsal night, from having worked with them in previous productions, or seen them onstage in previous experiences at Music Guild or beyond in the theater community. I knew people from Children of Eden, Augustana College, and Alleman High School when I did The Scarlet Pimpernel in 2002. I knew people from Pimpernel in Damn Yankees in 2004. I knew people from a mix of those shows from that point on. As for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in 2007, I had a bunch of kids and teenagers I had substitute taught in the Rock Island, Moline, and United Township school districts over the past two years. Same went for Meet Me in St. Louis in 2012.
So by the time we got to 2022, with my joining the cast of Cinderella, there was a very eclectic mix of people in the cast, comprised of longtime friends, relatively recent friends, and people I had yet to meet, but would like upon first impression at that very first rehearsal.
Cinderella was the unique circumstance where the cast burst into applause just because I walked into the room. Apparently Harold, the director, had set me up well with a good introduction before I arrived. I joined the cast late. I was invited to the cast by way of an e-mail, three months after the auditions. My schedule freed up, creating the opportunity for me to join the cast. At that particular moment in time, as I arrived to pay the assistant director my deposit for the script, and Harold introduced me in person, I felt a true sense of belonging. I had no doubt that I would keep caught up with the cast. Even as I'd be moonlighting as a backstage member of the crew on the June production of Something Rotten, I had faith that the acquaintances I had made at Music Guild, and the theater community of the Quad Cities wrought large, involved in the production staffs of each respective show would work in collaboration and conjunction with each other to allow me to navigate between the two productions and their overlapping rehearsal schedules, and allowing me to make optimum use of time as I ambulated between the two, at times attending portions of each rehearsal on the same night.
I had a similarly good experience with Vintage Hitchcock at Richmond Hill Players. The director, Jonathan Grafft, and his wife, Anne Keeney-Grafft, the stage manager, gave all of us actors a lot of breathing room to develop our parts. As it was the fall show, it overlapped with the school year. They were very accommodating for me when I had to arrive at rehearsal late due to travel from work. As I was pushing myself in directions I had never gone before, playing the aforementioned Russian terrorist and bombmaking professor, they gave me the right balance of guidance and free-reign. They set up an environment where all of us actors could build our skill sets and go to places with characters we had never gone before as actors. I think we all really grew.
So to come to the crux of this post, working on the shows that I have done this year kept me off the streets. They gave me new communities that developed into theater families. And in the case of giving me a show date, call time, meeting time, and places time, I knew that I had to keep my big mouth shut when confronted with a potentially dangerous person on Hubbell Road in East Moline, Illinois. The need to keep myself out of trouble to make the show thaat night was what prompted me to hold my tongue. The performing arts may just as well have saved my life.