In the draft of the script that currently stands (and will be read publically on Monday night, December 5, 2011, at 8pm in the Thrust Theatre for those who are interested!) there’s a quote that I have found particularly meaningful, and I think my cohorts have become rather attached to it, as well. It’s from a blog called “A Fan for All Seasons,” posted October 22, 2010. We’re using a cutting of it in the script, but for your reading pleasure, here’s the whole thing:
"To commit to a side is to be a fan; to be a fan is noble. Sports are an escape for us but also an anchor. We live through our athletes, we share their pain and their gain. Professional and Olympic sports are grown men or women getting paid (or getting sponsorships) to do what they love in
format where they are constantly tested against others who grew up being ‘The Best’. To witness someone struggle and fall, only to lift themselves back up and attain the sweet reward, that is why we watch, that is why it is compelling. It is real. It’s not a movie. It is us. That’s someone’s son, someone’s dad, someone’s brother. For the sports fan an image can stay with us like a loved one, like a memory of something beautiful that can never fully be replicated. In that moment you feel you’ve almost become that person’s family and you grieve and you hope and you celebrate as if nothing else mattered. Sport satisfies our need to hope, to feel there is something pure, like the image of arms hoisting the trophy, the winner kissing their sweetheart, the loser screaming into the grass, the goat weeping into two hands, or the veteran waving to the crowd as he exists his last game. In an era of text messages and pop-up ads, it’s good to FEEL something. In the end, we're all kids. It's not just about being in a packed stadium rocking the foundation with sound. It's about looking at an empty stadium and feeling hope."
Reading over this again, even having read it fifty times already, it gives me a strange sort of clean feeling, like the calm before the storm. It’s the same feeling I get before I walk onstage opening night, or before I enter the cemetery at a funeral. It’s a feeling of anticipation and readiness and a certain amount of confidence that I know I have the strength to do what has to be done. It’s funny to me that words from some strangers blog about sports could give me that feeling. I wonder if it does the same thing for other people?
I also wonder if theatre can do this for people - if an image from a show can stay with a person “like a loved one.” When we, as spectators, look at an empty stage, what do we feel? Do we hold the actors onstage dear to our hearts? Do we rejoice in their triumph and despair in their downfall - or, are we smug in their defeat, complacent when they do well? Does an empty stage fill a modern audience with anxiety and dread?
Certainly, it’s different for everyone. Speaking for myself, an empty stage is, and for my entire life has been, something magical. I remember walking onto the stage at the Grand Ole Opry a few years ago, the stage at the New Amsterdam in New York City, and Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. I remember working my way through the mysterious underbelly of the Drury Lane theater in London. I remember the first time I set foot onto my high school’s stage, my elementary school’s oversized platform, my church’s altar... every time, everywhere, it’s been that same magical feeling - that sense of the calm before the storm. It’s like a sixth sense comes alive and reacts to an unseen current of energy in the air.
Does everyone get to experience that feeling? Does everyone have that little touch of magic in their lives - that feeling that anything is possible? I hope so. I can’t imagine how dull my life would be without it.
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