An Ode to the Highs and Lows of High School Theater, or, Against Cringe

We’re climbing up the stairs of Whole Foods with our matching cartons of soup, and before I know it, I’m singing a line from the opening number of the fall musical. 

“Something whispered in an alleyway or through a–”

“–crack!”

We finish each other’s lyrics until we’re a chorus again. Every time we wrap up rehearsal, leaving the theater pitch dark and cavernous behind us, someone ends up saying a word that makes us all start singing again. You would not believe the number of times “We’ll Go From There” can force itself into an otherwise normal conversation.

We’ve been here on this open Whole Foods floor many times. We’ve paced around the square tables while deliberating plans for each show. Who would fit as this character? How do we stage a song with two Razor scooters in it? When will I get home to start doing my homework? (We can never ask that last question in full seriousness because, by the time we’re on the Tribeca Bridge, it’ll be empty and harshly lit against the night sky.) Sometimes, when we’re casting a show, a multitude of us hunched over a small laptop, we’ll be inspired by the sound of a stranger’s ranting monologue.

If there’s something strange about high school theater, it’s making yourself more visible when it feels like everyone else prefers to be invisible. Instead of dressing for school and fretting at the mirror alone, a group of people huddle in front of the costume room mirror and watch as a character begins to take shape. Shirts from old shows going back years stay on the walls, and playbills from older generations of Stuyvesant students remain posted as a welcome look at the people who got to these shows before we could. 

The joys that come with being a kid in theater often seem temporary and trivial. For instance, there’s Ryan from High School Musical, High School Musical 2, and High School Musical 3, who, despite being one-dimensional in his beret and gloves, remains the most endearing character for his commitment to the bit. But his reactionary nature, scattered with only rare moments of decisive action, shouldn’t represent the majority of theater kids. If high school is everyone’s last chance to be bold and goofy, then why degrade a group of teens taking that chance?

Stuyvesant is a school with a substantial history, so it might sound baffling that we find our closest connections to this prestigious legacy in short-lived three-night shows. It sounds strange that reintroducing ourselves in unceremonious, 250-character “blurbs” in a playbill can be meaningful. It might sound worrying that the only way I start to find my voice is by playing someone else. When my first-week-of-freshman-year self heard on the morning announcements that auditions for Something Rotten! were happening that day, I went because I was at a loss about my high school identity, hoping someone along the way would assign me one.

Few, if any, casting decisions are made based on how much an actor already relates to a character—that sort of performance is more so reserved for trick-or-treating on Halloween than the theater. I don’t relate to a character living through the Russian Revolution and trading music boxes for cans of beans. I do, however, relate to how he isolates himself, grieves, loves, and makes mistakes. In this way, acting is speaking multiple languages at once: the language of Shakespeare when he throws a curveball soliloquy at you, the body language of other people who share the stage and scene with you, and even the frantic mime language of your director watching from the audience as you forget your blocking. And speaking multiple languages is talking to multiple people’s hearts—something the best actors are always hoping to do.

But whenever I think I’m getting better at public speaking between mic-checks and Brooklyn Tech jokes during SING!, I'm plagued by the fear that I’m only “good” at public speaking when I’m filtering the words of a playwright. It feels wrong to take credit for my rendition of somebody else’s words. I am just a well-functioning megaphone. I memorize my lines, and if I forget them, then I fail even at being a megaphone!

We think of theater kids as deluded because they spend time worrying about “less important” roles and “less important” people. But theater is simply a place where young people spend time discussing characters’ motivations and feelings with full respect and without judgment. When actors interpret what a character means in every single line, they render them more human than the villains and heroes in books, films, and newspapers. 

Being on stage does not mean that I stop paying attention to other people. It is when I am in the weeks leading up to the show that I find myself people-watching on the subway, from the costumes they wear to what the expressions on their faces communicate. We are already doing theater all the time, every day. Engaging in theater is looking at the task we have as teenagers—the burden of performing—and asking for help from others.