If you've seen or heard of the "Three Piggy Opera," then you probably know how completely irrelevant the role of straw peddler is; but, as a kindergartener fascinated by the art of theatre, I took the role as an opportunity to show the world what I was capable of. Despite having a horrible, high-pitched voice, I sung my heart out and quickly realized how much I loved to perform.
Fast forward 10 years and I would find myself auditioning for theatre productions at my arts-centric high school. I was surrounded by immensely talented actors and felt pretty incompetent, but I've never considered that a real obstacle to me trying my best. The first role I would get in high school would be a European war prince (I honestly can't even remember his name, but I know he had at most 10 lines) in the production of "Keep Your Pantheon" which was so low budget it had to be performed in our amphitheater with nearly no set and a tech booth so roughly pieced together that it literally caught on fire prior to one of our performances (we performed anyways in case you were wondering, a lot of Febreze helped eliminate some of the smokey scent).
As I developed as an actor throughout high school and truly began to understand what it is like to "become one" with a character, I would be cast in larger and larger roles, most of which were in Shakespeare shows. From Lucentio in "The Taming of a Shrew" to Lord Capulet in "Romeo and Juliet," I found myself challenged by the embodiment of these more classical figures.
When summer rolled around, a friend of mine in my high school's theatre department asked me to be a part of his show "Lady Windermere'$ FAM" (a modern take on "Lady Windermere's Fan" by Oscar Wilde). I hesitantly agreed but had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into. I found myself in a show filled with cocaine addictions, drinking bleach, affairs, memes (especially dat boi), and jokes about the fact that when British people speak, "artistic" and "autistic" sound incredibly similar. The show's climax occurred when I came out in a panda suit in the middle of a theatre production within this theatre production (showception) and the song "Panda" by Designer played and I proceeded to decimate every member of the cast with a pillow.
It was not quite Shakespeare, and some of the jokes were too offensive for me to even begin to mention here, but watch the whole video if you're really interested (see 44:21 for the panda attack).
After acting in this show, I began to reconsider my path as an artist and ultimately decided that theatre was not a path that I would continue down. As a musician and a writer, I found myself more attracted to these forms of creation, but theatre will always hold a special place in my heart because of what it taught me:
People are everything.
I know that that's a very strange lesson to pull from a show that was essentially one extended meme, but I realized that every character I've ever played was their own individual person with an entire history and personality, constantly thinking and processing the world the way that we all do. When you go see a play, you aren't going for the stage production or even the story, but for the characters, because people are at the basis of everything that we care about. Although I'll probably never agree to act in another production, I could not be happier to have the theatre experience that I have.
