Space, Time and Energy
Hello. I’m Bruce Collier, and it’s my privilege to share a few thoughts to help open Emerald Coast Theatre Company’s Season 12.
Context, anyone? I’m glad you asked.
Seven years ago this past winter, I acted in my first production at Emerald Coast Theatre. It was Bakersfield Mist, a comedy/drama by Stephen Sachs, directed by Nathanael Fisher. The cast, in its entirety, was me and my longtime theatre comrade Teance Blackburn. I think there was one sound cue. Maybe two. No costume changes. No intermission.
The stage platform was lower then. It’s higher now. There were no risers then, but in time a very generous patron bought a whole set of ‘em. They’ve been added-to since. As I recall, Nathanael, Teance and I rehearsed approximately where the VIP Lounge and the scene shop are now located.
What was our dressing room area is now stocked with props and furniture. The costumes were once stored in bins. Now they hang from the ceiling like a technicolor rainforest. The old scene shop now serves as a rehearsal area, classroom, Green Room, and audition space. It also served as a bar/buffet at a recent gala. I could go on. So I won’t.
In those seven years, the space has remained the same. What has filled it - well, that’s a different tale entirely.
If someone had thought to do overhead, time-lapse photography in the space, over that period, I think the result, speeded up, might resemble a carousel. Moving clockwise, then counter-clockwise, people and objects drawn here and there, like metal filings on a magnet - by a likewise unseen energy.
Energy. There’s a tendency sometimes to think of actors as show-offs, but in my experience that usually happens when the actor hasn’t done any acting in a while. Working actors have an outlet for that special kind of energy. Yes, we crave a spotlight, but we like it to be on our terms. And there’s where things get more complicated.
Theatre, unlike writing, painting, music, sculpture or woodworking, requires the participation - sometimes even the permission - of others to practice it. Yes, you can go out into the street and perform - assuming you don’t get chased off - but you still need an audience, somebody, willing to watch you, or the transaction remains incomplete. A theatrical production is the Falling Tree in need of the populated forest.
I’ve done a lot of productions since college - summer stock, repertory, regional, an original script in New York, an unforgettable Shakespeare tour of the southeastern United States, and a dinner theatre show I never want to talk about. Plus, 23 years of professional theatre here on the Emerald Coast. I am not alone in that. It’s remarkable how it all follows a similar pattern.
A group of people - sometimes friends, sometimes strangers, usually a mix - comes together in a theatre. The tone is polite, everyone on their best company manners. There’s a script read-through, discussion of schedules, appointments for costume fittings, voice and dance rehearsals, blocking scenes. Walls start to break down, reserve melts. Subtly, that unseen energy starts to weave in and out, transforming individuals into a company and a production, all the way up to performance.
The best analogy I can use for theatre is Conspiracy - minus the criminal part. It’s a closed combination of specialists, organized and dedicated to a common purpose, working toward an agreed-upon date of execution. To an outsider just peeking in, it can look disorganized, dissonant, dull, all pointless chaos without form and void - in short, like anything but what it is…which is Art.
You can’t avoid it - Theatre is Art, and if that word intimidates you, don’t worry. No one really knows or can fully agree on exactly what “Art” means. Playwright/poet Oscar Wilde probably got as close to the bone as anyone when he flatly stated: “All Art is quite useless.” It was anything but a sneer - considering how wealthy Art made Oscar Wilde, before he got canceled. It was a kind of statement of liberation. We can’t concede Art’s uselessness without first asking - if it really is useless, then why has every civilization in recorded history persisted in making it? And looking at it?
As Wilde would not have put it: Because we gotta.
If you’re still reading this, you might be sitting in the theatre waiting for the show to start. I’ll take a leap of faith and presume that, at least to some extent, I am preaching to the choir. Or the congregation, just to keep the analogy pure.
You chose to be here. Maybe you’ve seen this show somewhere else and loved it so much you had to see it again. Maybe a friend or family member is in it, and you’re turning out to support them. Maybe you auditioned, didn’t get cast, and can’t resist the urge to see who they thought was better than you for that role…(we’re only human).
You are a part of the Artistic Transaction.
Whether you’re a first-timer or a regular patron, take a moment to notice (or recall) the atmosphere in a theatre on a show night. The buzz, the expectation, watching the seats fill as curtain time approaches. Then as that time comes and passes, because the show you are about to see is Sold Out, and the house management staff members are seeing how many wait-listed people can be accommodated with No Show seats.
By the way, my wife might have sold you your tickets. She works at ECTC. If you are watching a Theatre Camp or teenage actor production, you might be about to see my daughter. She has been acting in ECTC shows since 2019. Or maybe I’m backstage waiting to go on. If I’m doing one of my four one-man shows - all of which have been produced at ECTC, I am deeply grateful to say - I’m anxious to make your acquaintance, and justify the appreciation that you have always shown me.
These past two seasons have seen unprecedented growth at ECTC - casts have grown from two to multitudes. ECTC is now staging big cast musicals - The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, The Sound of Music, and most recently Mary Poppins, with record-size casts.
The small cast musicals are still done - they are popular and there are some truly great ones. Last fall, Million Dollar Quartet was a massive hit, with sellout audiences. I was told that a lot of people who don’t usually go to see plays came to see this one - for the music and bigger-than-life personalities of Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. This fall I’ll bet many of those same people have booked to hear Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons evoked on stage in Jersey Boys.
It reminds me of the first time I saw a pro football game live at a stadium. I’ve never been a sports fan. I don’t dislike sports, I just didn’t grow up playing or watching, so it’s a rare occasion you’ll find me intentionally watching sports on TV. But when I was living in New Orleans in the late 1980s, a friend gave me tickets to watch the Saints play the San Francisco 49ers at the old Superdome, a short streetcar ride and walk from my apartment in the lower Garden District. Since even I knew who Joe Montana was, I went. They were great seats, close to the action.
To a sports novice, it was an assault on the senses, a close encounter of the best kind. The crowd, the immediacy, the in-your-face and in-your-ears action - and the actual sound of a tackle, which made me think of a rhinoceros I once saw in mating season at the Montgomery zoo. Since then, even the best sports bar TV and sound system has never come close. If Russell Crowe had shouted his famous question at me, I’d have to have said “You bet I am entertained!” Live theatre is live theatre, in or out of the arena. That’s a big part of what I mean when I talk about the Artistic Transaction.
That Transaction is alive and well and living at ECTC. Robust as it is, it is nevertheless delicate, and ephemeral.
Last year’s ECTC production of Patrick Barlow’s A Christmas Carol started rehearsals November 14 and opened December 8, with a week off for Thanksgiving. The show closed and struck on December 22. Start to finish, that’s not even six weeks, from bare stage to bare stage, a full-blown production of a 100-page adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic. No video, no Original Cast recording - we left not a rack behind.
Just in time to start work on the next production, The Play That Goes Wrong. It was set in the drawing room of an English country house, loaded with booby traps, false floors, rigged props, and collapsing stairs. It opened one month and four days after Scrooge & Co. departed - and that’s counting the Christmas/New Year’s holidays….with The Marvelous Wonderettes occupying the Cabaret space.
It was sort of biblical - The Play That Goes Wrong begat Crimes of the Heart, which begat Mary Poppins, with a Storyteller Series and Theatre for Young Audiences slipped in for good measure. But barring some posters and packed-away props and costumes, there’s not a trace of any of those shows to be seen.
Support of the arts involves a lot of choices and decisions for the would-be patron. Support can take many forms. You can buy an artist’s work, or buy him a sandwich. You can stage a full-fledged exhibition, or pay for paint, clay, or guitar strings.
But what do you give to an Empty Space? That’s what Peter Brook called Theatre. He was a British director who wrote a book called….well, The Empty Space, so there. To be honest, Brook wasn’t above staging plays in actual empty spaces, but then he worked in the ‘Sixties. Orson Welles might be a better example. He famously called a movie studio “the greatest set of electric trains a boy could ever have.” Yeah, that’s better.
Welles was all about potential, tapping into Shakespeare’s image of a theatre as the world in miniature. Every time I see ECTC’s bare stage after a show closes, I marvel at how much was able to be done in a few feet of space.
Theatre is one of those unique, intense pleasures that are not designed to last, except in the individual hearts of the artists and the audiences. The process must be done again and again - conceived, assembled and built from the ground up, performed and experienced. Then packed away - one hopes, to be fondly remembered.
Some theatre producers like seasonal themes - satire, Southern drama, classic Broadway, new works, etc. Other theatre companies produce varied seasons - dramas followed by comedies spaced out with musicals or one-person shows. It’s partly to see what plays (and what doesn’t). But I think its greatest strength is enlisting and cultivating broad continued support, not only ticket-by-ticket, but also long term patronage, the kind of support that doesn’t just fill seats, but also builds stages, equips sound and light systems, and encourages vision.
When I did my first show at ECTC, I knew things were just getting started. I found that appealing, the idea of being in at the birth. I also knew that plenty of theatres and theatre groups rise, flourish briefly, then dissolve. It didn’t take long to see that here was a consistent, constant spirit of improvement, of wanting to make the next show even better, and a desire to reach out to theatre artists and educators in the area, along with photographers, media, schools, and other existing producers, an invitation to come together with an eye to collaboration.
At the age of 61, I got my second artistic wind at ECTC. Its Northwest Florida Theatre Festivals in 2018 and 2019 gave me the motivation to research and write three one-man shows. I’ve seen my daughter evolve from happy audience member to serious young actress. My wife (also a Theatre major) has been able to employ her God-given creative and organizational talents in the arts.
And I just got to tell you all about it. Thanks for reading. If you’re waiting to see a show, enjoy it. If you enjoyed it, help it continue, to the best of your own abilities and resources. If you’re a theatre artist, keep the faith…..
