Student Blog: The Show Must Go…On (?)

Please enjoy the photo of a baby Oneonta deer while we ruminate on the meaning of life and art and all that jazz. 

Life revolves one or two moments, well maybe one moment split into two sagas, two episodic defining events that we are structured around for the rest of infinity

It's the first time you fall off your two wheeler bike. Doesn’t matter your age it’s always going to be that first time you fall. Because that first fall feels like the end of life as you know it. Especially if it happens before the age of 10. You hit the ground after previously defying gravity and are struck by the absolutely terrifying concept that now the world is a place where you can cause your own pain. Where you can try and try and try, and still somehow, end up flat on your face. Or your back. Staring at the sky. Or the ground. Blood on your hands and knees, tears on your face. 

That's the first moment. The time when gravity became your worst enemy. No matter how hard you tried to stay upright and strong, you fell down. It was this soul crushing pain that faded so quickly but scarred forever. The second sage: changed everything once again. 

It’s crazy how before your prefrontal cortex is fully developed the world can end a multitude of different times, and in that same vein, it begins over and over and over again. 

Episode two sees you slowly sit up, dry your tears, look up at the sky, and get back on that dang bike. Maybe you get back on because you want to try again, maybe you get back on because your jerky big brother called you a cry baby for being scared of getting hurt, or maybe you get back on so you can go cry to your mom and get a Mickey Mouse band aid. Any way that story went for you, you got back up again. You had to….Or you’d still be there. On the street where you grew up, outside your grandparents house, in the neighborhood park. You would still be there, tears streaming down your face and scrapes on your knees, but evidently you aren’t because you’re sitting here reading this article. Congratulations my friend. You survived the Great Unknown and turned it into a Simple Known. 

So what does this have to do with Theater? Well, I thought you’d never ask! We have heard that same old archaic mantra since we first donned our mic tape and tap shoes: 

“The Show Must Go On!”

There’s no business like show business, no business I know, and that business know’s no stop, pause or breaks. Of course there is the solid Equity 10 after 60 max 80, but yet I don’t think our industry has yet to figure out what a break actually means. It’s definitely a relative term because how do we force every actor, singer, dancer, technician, manager, designer etc, agree what a break means to them? We don’t! So let’s return to the ‘you who fell off the bike’ all those years ago. Would you have wanted to ever set foot near a bicycle again if someone was screaming at you to get back on it again? You just fell for goodness sakes, your ego is bruised and you want someone to hug you and curse gravity loudly using bad words. So the end result is the recognition that we take a break when we want to, our show goes on until we choose to hit the pause button and take our Equity 10. Otherwise we;re not gonna want to start again. 

The best example of a real life honest to god theater break that I can think of would have been the Pandemic. We all had to stop whether we liked it or not. But even then, we kept making art, we kept making Sondheim revues and John Lennon covers, because art is persistence art is resistance art is revolution. Even through the pandemic we were sending in audition and self tapes, taking musical theater intensives, auditioning for drama programs and tap dancing in our basements. 

For the theater industry, theater was like falling off the bike and hitting the ground super duper hard. Every action has an equal opposite reaction, and for all you Hamilton fans..Sir Issac Newton said it first. Whether it was Mr Miranda or Mr Newton, they were right. You can’t smack the ground at full force, or slam the breaks on life without feeling the kick back. What I’m getting at is the fact that we are almost programmed since our first fall off the bike to get back up again. We lie there contemplating life, staring at the sky, staring at the wall of our bedroom, staring out the window, then we feel that equal opposite reaction beckoning us to keep going. Demanding we take the next step forward.