You get goosebumps and you can feel the adrenaline pumping as you take one last deep breath before you have to stop being yourself for the next hour and a half. The lights and music cut out. The darkness is blinding and the silence deafening. Tense seconds pass and a single set of footsteps can somehow be heard over the roar of nothingness. They stop. A soft tapping on keys cuts through the dark. The lights come back up on a single person sitting center stage in a chair, typing away at a computer.
This is one of the most exhilarating moments I've ever experienced. It's the fifteen seconds that stretch between right now and eternity. It stretches you out and compacts you at the same time.
Theatre does that to you. You spend months working on a single, hour-long piece before suddenly you're performing. Up until the shows start running, you can mess up. You can stop and backtrack if you need to. But once the curtain comes up on opening night, there's no room for error. It becomes the greatest source of both stress and joy in the world for you.
People don't always realize just how much time and love gets put into every show. For the most recent show I've been involved in, we put in sixteen hours a week for three months in rehearsal time. That doesn't even take into consideration the man-hours outside of rehearsals which are spent building sets, stitching costumes together, and the like.
We don't do it because we want to be recognized for it. Pretty much everyone I've gotten to work alongside would show up for rehearsals even if we didn't have a final showing. We do it because we love it. Life would be so much less stressful if we had those extra hours back every week. We could spend more time sleeping, going out, or even just sitting in one place not trying to remember lines or where to find our props.
Notice, I left "spend time with our friends" out of that list above. It's because we're with them already. If you don't know someone on the first day of rehearsals, you'll be really close by the end of the process. Some of my best friends have been people who I didn't know at all leading into the show and have just struck up conversation with along the way. If you're too nervous to actually initiate the conversation, people will come up to you and talk if you just put yourself in the right setting.
Theatre is a place you go for the experience of a lifetime. It gives you a rush unlike anything else, somewhere between crippling fear and unbreakable pride. You also make some incredible friends and tap into a whole subculture that will amaze you again and again. Above all else though, it'll teach you to never be scared of what comes your way because there's nothing that you can't do.
