I can smell it — some kind of faint, dry smell, almost like ash. I’ve never been able to figure out exactly what causes this smell … maybe dust burning against the stage lights? I don’t know, but all theaters have it. Even now, this smell does something to me. It activates something in my body. There’s nostalgia, but also something else.
I’m sitting in one of those heavy metal chairs with thin, coarse, largely useless upholstery in the back row on handmade wooden risers. The house lights are already dim. Audience chatter blends into a dull, irregular murmur. The setup has pushed me a little too close to the woman who invited me here tonight — an older lady, a friend of my late grandma.
I twist a small ring on my left middle finger. It became mine in the first days following my grandmother’s unexpected death. I found it in the top drawer of her jewelry box. My mom told me to take it; who else would want this particular ring?
It’s gold, but probably fake. A small golden band with two theatrical masks, one smiling, one frowning.
Grandma’s friend invited me here tonight because she knows we shared a love for theatre. Long before I got the bug, Grandma would take me to local productions. It was one of our things. This was before I discovered the intensity, the vital force — a fullness of life that I have only ever seen live on the stage.
This woman tells me that she thinks my grandma was lonely in her last months. I offer some half-response. That kills me, but the fact is, I wasn’t here. I was in survival mode in an intense, thousand-hour theatre program in East Jesus Nowhere, California.
I twist the little golden masks around my finger. This place still activates me, wakes me up.
But I also feel vaguely nauseous. Just sitting in this chair is exhausting, and it’s pushing funny on my back. I know some of these actors, and when I talk to them after the show, they’re going to want to know what my next project is.
There isn’t one. Who knows if there ever will be.
***
The air is buzzing. It’s hot. It’s dark. The curtains, the floor, everything is black, and the lights are all off. I can barely see the outline of my own body. I can hear the voices of the audience, but I can’t see them from behind the thick, black stage curtains. There are props haphazardly scattered around. The air has a subtle smell to it — I’m not completely sure what it is. Dust burning against the stage lights? That smell can still transport me. Sometimes I wonder if there’s some magick in it that makes everything onstage alive. I’ve never felt that kind of life — vitality — anywhere else. Ever. That night, I became addicted to it.
Certain things come back as a full sensory experience. That show is one of them: the magnetic, electric stuff that was floating through the air.
This was my first show — a short piece about a bullied boy who finds improbable success in his dreams. I was 14 years old and one of two ninth graders in the fledgling Comparative Arts program (now known as Interdisciplinary Arts) at Interlochen Arts Academy — an arts-focused boarding school that was known around the world for the brilliant young artists it produced. Before we started performing, one of the theatre majors told me, roughly, that if I wanted to do theatre, there better be nothing else out there that I could do. It had to be my one thing. It was going to take it all.
Interlochen was a strange place for me. I came from a family where we received food stamps for a period of time and my dad drove a cab to pay my tuition. The other kids already traveled the world and I hadn’t even had internet access until I was 13; I felt a sort of condescending disbelief from my classmate when she had to walk me through how to use a flash drive. I felt awkward trying to critique musical themes and variations — I hadn’t even been taught what those things were before. And my trademark sarcasm was read as negativity, causing those who barely even knew me to walk all over campus talking about how negative I was.
That year was miserable in ways it simply didn’t need to be, but I did find theatre. I tried out an acting class, and it was cool. I tried out another one, and it was life changing.
It was an introductory class, but this teacher did not mess around. I didn’t know much about various theatre pedagogies back then, but I was told that this woman’s class was very movement focused, that she expected a lot of hard work and that she had studied at a school called Dell’Arte.
“You must commit!” Her eyes would grow wide and her body would fill with tension. She wasn’t happy unless we had energy down to our fingertips.
“Don’t apologize.” This woman certainly was not apologizing — half the time, she was fucking terrifying — but I was amazed. I had been told my whole life that I was too emotional, too intense, that nobody would like me if I couldn’t tone it the hell down. I was simultaneously too loud and disruptive while also being awkward and antisocial, and now you’re telling me that I could just choose to move through life like this? That I could give that much, care that much?
If we measure emotions and intensity on a scale of one to 10, 10 is almost never socially acceptable. Theatre is one of the few places where the 10 isn’t just allowed, but necessary. Even today, years later, I still filter and shrink myself in most spaces. Not onstage. Where else do we cultivate access to the 10? Here is one of the few places we explore the outer limits of human expression. And we celebrate it.
We were to enter the class in silence every day, and without any prior discussion, somebody was to push the dust broom across the floor before class started. She would come in on the hour and lead us through Sun Salutations, our bodies rising and folding, chests opening and contracting, flowing through an ages-old yoga sequence, with energy pulsing through the body and down to the fingertips. Then we would play games — dancing volleyball was a favorite, but she would call out half-assed dancing. Even dancing volleyball had to be ferocious.
Interlochen gave me an all-consuming passion, a focus for my life and a giant fucking complex. I spent my year in the northern Michigan woods being told that being there meant I had a lot of natural potential, but that I had to give literally everything to realize it. I took that to heart. I was completely willing to fight for my craft.
I lived my life differently from then on. I took up space. I asked for what I wanted. For a myriad of reasons, I opted not to return to Interlochen the next year, instead making a nuisance of myself in the public school system, marching myself down to the advisor’s office when I didn’t like something and calling out nonsense when I saw it.
For the rest of high school, I immersed myself in theatre. Instead of joining clubs or trying sports, I would truck off to nightly rehearsals with adults, people sometimes twice my age. I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “I Can’t. I Have Rehearsal.” My social life and all of my leisure time were bound up in theatre.
It’s not that I never did anything else, but the time commitment of rehearsals ensured that other pursuits were limited. Almost alll I ever did was rehearse for shows.
I loved theatre, but it was a complicated love. There was never giddiness or sense of light fun to it; I hate being asked how theatre brought me joy because I’m not sure that’s ever what it was about. But there was something deep there. In the best moments, my blood gets richer, thicker, more vital. The air gets buzzy, vibrating subtly. The core of my chest feels warm, heavy, powerful, molten. I swear I can feel the energy of the audience pressing in on me, feeding me. In the best moments, I can become whole in ways I didn’t realize were possible.
There were a few of those moments, and a lot of other good ones. I especially fell in love with the communal aspect; theatre is a whole lot of teamwork, saying yes and covering for each other when things go wrong onstage. But there were also a ton of moments where I did not feel part of the community. I was always accepted for the duration of the show, but it never translated into a friend group that endured beyond the final curtain.
And there was a whole lot of pressure: to be early, because on time is late. To take directorial notes without question even if you’re confused as hell. To accept what the director gives you, even if what they give you is yelling and doing shitty things to provoke a reaction because you’re not giving them quite what they want in a scene. Never be difficult. Never show pain or exhaustion. Never let anything else get in the way of the show, including your own wellbeing.
A couple of days before I turned 20, I impulsively moved from Ann Arbor to Detroit. There, I was exposed to the idea of the arts as activism.
I first learned about the idea in an artists’ co-op in Eastern Market called Young Fenix. During the course of that project, I had a guest come in and run through Theatre of the Oppressed games. Created by Augusto Boal amid the 1964 coup in Brazil and known as the “rehearsal for the revolution,” TO comprises a set of theatrical techniques designed to get actors and audience alike questioning norms, get the audience involved in solutions and explore the ways issues live in us and oppress us. I’d seen firsthand the transformative power that theatre had, but this was a concrete way that it was being used to affect change.
This only enhanced my passion. This proved that theatre is the shit that topples tyrants. We, the artists, the performers, the embodiers of those who cannot speak, are dangerous, and I love it. I am angry at so much in this world and here, HERE, is a way to fight back. Here anger turns to divine beauty, beauty begets play and we play the game of progress. And win. It’s a tool, and it’s effective.
I also, not entirely knowing what I was getting myself into, got cast with UnTheatre Co., a small theatre company in Detroit practicing a type of theatre called Neo-futurism, where the performers don’t actually act, but take the stage as themselves, in the present moment, without pretending they are anyone else, anywhere else or doing anything they cannot actually do in the space they’re in. I wrote some of my most profound, personally altering work with them.
But, even as I was having all of these epiphanies, it wasn’t always smooth sailing with UnTheatre. I spent the entire callback process feeling defective: From the moment I walked in, they seemed to take some issue with me. Toward the end of the two weeks of callbacks, the producer took me aside and basically ripped into me about serious concerns they had about my ability to “handle the process,” my personality, approach to work — and the list goes on.
After I’d been there awhile, I started quietly asking around, trying to get a handle on what the issue was. One person said, “Their thing with you is … personality.” So, as best I can make out, they just didn’t particularly like who I was as a person, which was a pretty big problem in an art form that relies on personal honesty.
I had moments with UnTheatre where I was happy, proud of myself and felt like part of a community. But I also had lots of moments where I laid in bed feeling anxious, wondering what had upset them on that particular day, lamenting that it really, really felt like everyone thought I was inferior and unlikeable, that my work was subpar and that something was just fundamentally wrong with me.
So, in case it wasn’t clear: I was having some anxiety, which carries even to now. Something changed during my time with this group, and now I tiptoe around my words much more carefully, constantly worried about saying the wrong thing.
The COVID-19 pandemic came right on the heels of a particularly stressful run with UnTheatre, and it could not have come a moment too soon. I was spiraling. Despite the horrors the world was going through, the pandemic was a relief for me. I could leave behind the drama and just focus on working — lone walks outside, not speaking to anybody. No other obligations. My mental health soared in those early months.
But then, we ran into a problem: My spine fell apart. It’s hard to say whether it was waiting tables, the pandemic slingshotting me from being highly active to sedentary or just the natural progression of scoliosis, but as the world slowly started to reopen, my back went to shit. I was constantly in pain, struggling to stand for long periods. In 2021, after a year of obsessive research and arguing with the health insurance company, I ended up having two lungs deflated, 24 titanium screws implanted and my spine yanked straight with what I can only describe as medical shoelaces.
Then, plot twist: About a month post-op, my chest filled with blood and my right lung collapsed again, requiring a second surgery. I ended up with heart rate and blood pressure malfunctions that still haven’t gone away two years later. I earned myself months of recovery and varying degrees of pain, aching, exhaustion and a heaping dose of post-surgical depression that made me question my whole life.
I remembered all of the greatest moments theatre had given me. Late nights at Aut Bar, midnight gin after a show, Cards Against Humanity at 4 a.m., gloriously funny fuck ups in dress rehearsals. Friendships. Adrenaline. Life.
And I thought about the grind. The exclusion. The fear of screwing up. The all-consumingness.
I thought back on everything I’d been able to do since the theaters shut down. I didn’t want to give any of it up. And I didn’t want to go back.
While others my age were making friends and trying new things, I was rehearsing. Before, I believed that theatre was at least as fulfilling as whatever else there was. Now, I felt cheated. What had I missed out on?
I was seriously considering whether I wanted to go back to theatre at all. Fire had been replaced by nausea and a quiet, jaded, exhausted rage. I felt chewed up, spit out, completely unwanted and unappreciated.
Then, I got an email from Dell’Arte International, a small, strange school in Blue Lake, Calif., population 1,100, focusing on ensemble devising and physical theatre. My class had seven people, coming from all corners of the U.S. and three other countries.
So I packed up my old, bumper-sticker covered Nissan, drove across the country and spent the year at Dell’Arte.
My first day at Dell’Arte, I went to the school and met the office administrator. By the end of that first conversation, I’d learned that there was a memorial garden in the school’s backyard where a few people had their ashes interred.
To repeat: People went to their eternal rest at the theatre school.
I’d learned enough about Dell’Arte (and theatre in general) over the years to make that seem about half as crazy as it actually was. People are really fucking devoted. Especially at a school where you take about 35 hours of classes a week, rehearse every weeknight, create an original performance every single week, sometimes have weekend classes thrown at you and are expected to do community service hours. And a lot of that is active — we’re talking an hour of conditioning, two hours of Capoeira, three hours of some kind of somatic rolling on the floor, maybe some improvisation exercise involving random mourning cries and literal howling into the void … then rehearsal. It never ends. But everyone leaves toned as hell.
In the early weeks, they took us outside a lot. We went on hikes, climbed things we probably weren’t supposed to and imitated the ocean with our bodies. At least early on, I felt like I was part of the group, and I felt significantly less judged than I had elsewhere. Despite the fact that my heart just about tried to seize every time we climbed a hill, my mental health went on a serious upswing. The physical demands whipped my body back into shape, helping me get closer to my pre-surgery self.
In some ways, Dell’Arte offered an alternative to a lot of the things about the culture and demands of theatre in late-stage capitalist America that I was struggling with. Instead of relying on scripts written by people far away and directors to craft the show, we devised everything as equals. It offered me a way to focus on original work, on what I have to say. It gave me more agency. Because it was so improvisational, it gave me back a sense of play, a willingness to take risks I’d lost.
But eventually, the grind started to get to me. My energy levels had also never fully recovered after my crisis the year before, and I was just getting more and more exhausted. Three weeks before the end of the program, I found myself sobbing in the program head’s office. In that moment, I knew I had to quit.
There was the practical problem of ableism: Theatre relies on pushing through pain and exhaustion (“the show must go on”), and that wasn’t a model my body was well adapted to anymore. Because the arts are underfunded and undervalued, it’s normal to have to keep a full-time day job, making time for our creative work in evenings and on weekends. You can’t approach an art like theatre with half-energy and expect to do a good job; it relies on life force.
There was also the culture. Possibly due to the constant grind and tight budgets, theatre has developed a kind of scarcity mindset. Everything is urgent, life-or-death important. There’s also the rigid hierarchies: The director is in charge and you don’t question their notes, which is fine, until you inevitably get a toxic director. Then there won’t be any support if you try to address it — because directors are supposed to be intense people, right? They’re artists.
It sucks. It completely sucks. But this is a question that I think a lot of artists are faced with. At what point can you not take it anymore? At what point does it stop being THE thing that makes you human and start sucking the life out of you instead?
I left Dell’Arte grieving; I was losing the most fundamental thing about me and leaving the group of people that I’d spent every waking moment with for the better part of a year.
Then, mid-cross country drive, I got a call that my grandmother — the one who’d taken me to shows when I was little — was in the hospital. The dementia that had been progressing slowly for some time ate her alive seemingly overnight. When I got home, she thought it was the ’90s and saw bugs all over me. Within a couple of weeks, she fell and hit her head, resulting in a fatal brain bleed. I spent the last year of her life doing theatre in a place too far away for me to spend time with her.
When my mom urged me to take that golden ring from her jewelry box, I felt like I was holding a small grave in my hand. I was laying my greatest fellow theatre lover to rest. But was I also saying goodbye to this part of myself?
It’s complicated. I haven’t quit, not completely. I have stepped back, not attending a single audition since graduating from Dell’Arte. I have played around and done small rehearsals for classes — I transferred to the University of Michigan the fall after Dell’Arte, and I’m pursuing an individualized program in social theory and practice, ostensibly so that I can expand on theatre as a form of activism and healing. I haven’t done a show since I’ve gotten back. But I have gone into a prison every week to make theatre with the people inside. For them, it’s still a release. It’s freedom. It’s play. It’s divine. It’s a nice reminder of what theatre can be.
The saddest part is, I still get performance buzz. I can still turn on in front of an audience. I can still feel the subtle electrical current in the air, but getting to that point is just so fucking exhausting.
I don’t know where I’ll go from here. I’d love to say that I’ll come up with better ways to practice theatre, ways that are inclusive and don’t burn people out so badly, but I honestly don’t know.
I still crave the 10 sometimes. But I don’t want to live there anymore. I certainly miss the communal aspect, but I don’t miss the moments where it became bogged down in the excess or the moments where it truly wasn’t inclusive.
So, we’ll see. Maybe someday I’ll find it in me to write a play about all of this. About all the ways we can do better by theatre. By each other.
Or maybe not.
Statement Correspondent Cydney Heed can be reached at cheed@umich.edu.