“The word ‘theatre’,” the great actress and acting teacher Stella Adler said, “comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place.”
Wikipedia says, “The word comes originally from the Greek Theatron, meaning roughly, ‘a place to behold’.”
I prefer Adler’s description. It holds much more meaning. Much more potential. Sure, you can see people acting and singing and pretending to be someone else in a theatER building of brick and mortar. But with the art of theatRE, if it’s done well, if it’s done right, you can see so much more. You can see true love and sheer joy and the most crushing sorrow and history & historical figures brought back to life and gods & monsters. You can see the plight and triumph of African Americans and Jews and Women and Homosexuals. You can see the human condition right before your eyes. Flesh and blood actors digging into the depths of their experience and psyches to bring all this to you live. So close in some theaters, you could reach out and touch them.
Of course you wouldn’t. That’d be weird and disruptive. And you’d be thrown out of the theater.
But that’s the difference between going to see a movie and going to see live theatre, isn’t it. I love movies, let me get that out of the way now. But, it’s not the same experience. Movies are distant. Theatre is immediate.
Nearly every year of my life, as far back as I can clearly remember, I’ve been involved with at least one play or musical. Some years there were multiple. Over those years, I’ve served as an actor, director, playwright, technical director, scenic designer, teacher and carpenter. I have even worked (and had a little fun with my good buddy, and fellow thespian, Bill Martinak) as a spotlight operator…or “spot op”, as we call it in the biz. There isn’t much about theatre I don’t love. I enjoy the load in and the load out. I usually even enjoy strike, or as my wife calls it, “strike out”(when we take down the set). I’ve worked semi-professionally, in academia and in community theatre. I enjoy the acting and directing, but also love designing and building sets. I can’t say I ever got very good at designing or running lights or sound, but because of my schooling and some guidance from people like Dave Surtasky, I could work a light or sound board adequately. I have truly enjoyed every aspect of theatre equally.
By the way, as you saw in the first paragraph, I tend to use “theatre” when talking about the art or the craft or the theatre world as a whole, and “theater” when talking about the building. Other than my own homes, and my church growing up, I’ve never felt I belonged somewhere more than in a theater. I love the feel and smell and vibe of a theater. In fact, one of my most favorite places to be is an empty, quiet theater, darkened but for the dim glow of the ghost light. It is as close to heaven as I’ll ever get.
My earliest memory of being in any kind of theatrical production was in elementary school, 3rd grade I think, when I played…a character…a prince I think, in an elementary school version of The Nutcracker. My recollections of this experience are so vague and faded, I hesitate to even say it was the first play I was in.
But I guess it was.
The first “proper” play I was in was called No Time for Skirts. It was 1979, I was in the 7th grade, and my English teacher, Nancy Hicks, directed the play. I remember virtually nothing about this play, but I think my character’s name may have been Bert Horst. I found a cast list on-line and this name is the only one that rings a bell. That same year, the director of the high school musical, Judith Witmer, was looking for extra guys to be in Annie Get Your Gun, and I was friends with her son, so I got to be in the show, as a 7th grader! My first line, the first line in the show actually, was “Indians! Indians! The Indians are coming!”
I’m pretty sure I was hooked at this point.
The next year I was in The Haunted Bookshop, directed by my Latin teacher, Shirley Houseal. I played Archibald…and I found a description of him online…and it’s hilarious, mainly because it really described me in 8th grade! Talk about type-casting!
A studious young chap, haunts the bookstore. He considers himself very intelligent and tries hard to impress others with his intelligence. He wears glasses and rather plain clothing.
According to the cast list I found, I had 62 lines!
The high school musical that year was Guys and Dolls, and again, even though I was only in 8th grade, I got to be in the show, because they were short on 
guys. I’ve always said my name in the show was Liver Lips Louie…although in the program, I’m listed merely as one of the crapshooters!
That’s me in the black and white picture, 2nd row, 1st guy seated on the left.
In 9th grade, I didn’t audition for the Fall Play, for some reason. Perhaps at the time it was only for 10-12 graders, who knows. But as fate or luck or whatever would have it, someone dropped out of Cheaper By the Dozen (directed by David Gates), and I was asked to take over the role of Fred. I remember this play, primarily because I had to speak several lines in German. The next spring I got to play Stewpot in South Pacific. That’s me with the guy who played Billis, Mark Stare, who was a senior at the time.
The following year’s play was The Curious Savage, in which I played Jeffrey, a resident of a sanatorium, who believed he had a scar on his face, although he did not. I spent the whole play with my hand on my face, covering a non-existent scar. And then got to play Available Jones in the musical Lil’ Abner! I’m the one with the bow-tie.
It was either this year, or the next, I was involved with an evening of student-directed plays. I played Adam in The Diary of Adam and Eve. Notable, because I had to kiss the girl who played Eve. She was a year or two older than me, and she wore some kind of lip balm that made my lips burn and tingle.
In 11th grade I played Roderick Usher in the play, The Fall of the House of Usher, and had my first leading role in a musical. We did Bye, Bye Birdie and I played Albert Peterson, the Dick Van Dyke role in the movie. Two things I remember from this show. One, when I watched the video, I noticed that I had adjusted my knit, square-bottom tie about 637 times. Also, during a matinée performance for the senior citizens of the community, I totally messed up the beginning of Put on a Happy Face, and we actually stopped and started it over. That was mortifying.
My senior year I was in 3 productions. The fall play in 1985 was Harvey, and I played Elwood P. Dowd, the role Jimmy Stewart made famous in
the film. I wore my fedora like I was in Duran Duran. Early in the rehearsal process, the director David Gates, thought it might be more authentic if I smoked in the play. I’m assuming I wouldn’t have actually lit the cigarette, but my parents wouldn’t even allow me to have it in my mouth. Funny thing was, unbeknownst to them, I’d already started smoking occasionally by that point.
And, I also played King Arthur in Camelot…my crowning high school achievement, so to speak! My close childhood friends, Debbie Gable and Ross Ball (the director’s son)played Guenevere and Lancelot respectively. They’d also played Rosie and Birdie opposite me in Bye, Bye Birdie. We were the holy trinity of the Lower Dauphin spring musical in 1985 and 86. And my best friend, Chris Sicher, played Mordred, Arthur’s bastard son in Camelot! As you might imagine, we had some fun with that.
After the musical, our thespian troupe took a play to a competition at the Buck’s County Playhouse. I think the play was called A Homecoming, and Debbie and I both took home Honorable Mention or Runner Up Awards for our performances…I don’t remember what the award was called exactly.
So…I was in 6 musicals and 8 plays from 1980 to 1986. I had made the stage my home, and had made a name for myself amongst my friends and classmates as “the actor” of the class, for sure. Judith Witmer had directed all the high school musicals I’d been in, and David Gates had directed all the high school plays I’d been in. They both helped to foster my love of theatre that had grown and grown over those early years.
It was also during this time that I got involved with an ill-fated community theater in my hometown of Hummelstown, Pennsylvania. The director, John Mandes, was directing shows like Crimes of the Heart and Bent and Christopher Durang’s The Actor’s Nightmare. The funny thing is, I think I was in The Actor’s Nightmare, but I’m not entirely sure. Maybe I dreamt it. Anyway, John had taught me in my first acting class in Harrisburg a year or so before that, and when he opened this theater, I was first in line to get involved. Unfortunately, it didn’t last very long. He was producing some edgier stuff, and I think he may have had some financial difficulties, so the good people of Hummelstown kicked him to the curb, so to speak. But for a brief shining moment, through that little theater, I was getting a glimpse of a wider theatre world.
Of course, it wasn’t until I got to college that I really started to learn what theatre was all about. And, boy, did I have a lot to learn.
To be continued…
stwaz's perspicacity 
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