Lights up.
It’s a chilly Sunday afternoon on the Stone Ridge campus. The entire cast of Shrek the Musical is crowded around a table of snacks, something every cast member is evidently fond of after a long day of rehearsal. They have spent three hours rehearsing while they could have been doing schoolwork, or, rather, anything else. “It really is something,” said Sophia Pirozzoli, ’16, assistant stage manager for Shrek. “It’s not ideal because I have to cut time out of work and homework.”
It’s difficult, admittedly, to dedicate most of your time and weekends to a production of a musical that will run for only three days. There’s the lingering fear that no one will show up, someone will fall off the stage (it’s happened, I speak from experience,) or someone will forget all of her lines. But to most, this is what keeps it exciting. The feeling of peeking out from behind the curtain and praying to God no one will see you (or the seven other people pressed up against the tiny crevice) and the quick-change that takes place after curtain in order to run out and jump into the arms of your friends and family are unforgettable.
For some of us, the latest musical will be the final installment of our theatrical careers. For Stone Ridge Drama Department veterans Camilla Duke, ’16, Anna Cantilena, ’16, and this reporter, their final bow after six years in the department will take place on April 23, 2016. It is a bittersweet moment; it is both a feeling of accomplishment and a sad farewell. “It hasn’t really hit me yet that this is my last production,” says Duke. “In a lot of ways, I’m really grateful for my experiences in the theatre department, especially because it’s how I’ve made my closest friends and how I’ve had some of my most meaningful experiences at Stone Ridge.”
While an incredible opportunity to bond with classmates, the experience has not been glamorous, to say the least. As previously reported in The Here and Now, the drama department here at Stone Ridge does not have an ideal building. The small stage, the tiny backstage area, the shared dressing room with the middle school technology students, and the barely-functioning microphones have kept any experience in a play or musical challenging. Additionally, “the financial burden [of the price of producing a musical] not being lessened is a difficult thing to put on only a few people’s shoulders,” said Ellen Morrissey, ’16, a participant in several student productions.
So what keeps students coming back? It can’t be the countless hours spent slaving over dance moves, or the tears of frustration that come with the difficulty of memorizing lines. “We all have an extreme passion for it. We don’t come back for the stage, does anyone come back for the stage?” said Cantilena jokingly. “We come back for the community. We love working until 10 p.m. with our friends because it makes us happy and proud of what we do.”
When the lights go down and the curtain closes, it is not the negligible room backstage or the shared close quarters that will be remembered. It will be the people who shared the stage together to create a beautiful story. It will be the legacy that lives on, even after we are gone: the students who, despite their differences, came back to that small, charcoal black stage and created something purely magical.
Lights down.
Leave a Reply