Arts Listings

The scene should have been a familiar one to a theater reviewer: rows of seats, the seatholders with an air of anticipation, focused on the spectacle to commence before them. 

As I took my own seat, I felt a little rush, similar to the pre-curtain exhilaration on an opening night. Nevertheless, I had that nagging feeling, like in a dream, that something was different, maybe wrong, like a schoolboy who hasn’t studied for a quiz, an actor going up on his lines. 

This was because the attention in that room was focused on me, a guest speaker in one of Marion Fay’s Theatre Explorations classes for Albany Adult School at the Northbrae Community Center. 

No matter how often you make your plaintive or congratulatory views known in print, how often you pipe up to put in your two cents worth, there’s a real difference between being a (more or less) professional spectator and becoming a public spectacle. 

Getting a grip, I told myself (and the class) I’d been on stage before, periodically since youth, when my conjurer dad set me up with a little show of illusions to wow cub scout packs and kids’ parties. 

But even that, and later ventures onto a stage, were in character—playing a role, I mean. This time, it was me as myself, the self that pecks out these mock-authoritative screeds on having seen some local show. And that was the upshot of those stage adventures—becoming a reviewer—about which I had been invited to the class to describe. 

I’d gotten an e-mail a few months ago from my esteemed colleague, fellow Planet writer Phil McArdle, telling me about the class he and his wife Karen attended; an enthusiastic group, Phil said, led by a dynamic teacher who occasionally used my reviews. The class featured guest speakers. Would I be interested? How about it? Disarmed, flattered by these symptoms of readership, I replied YES. Phil put me in touch with Marion, and a more formal invite followed. 

So with a few cues from Marion via e-mail, and many ruminations I knew were truthful and good, because they impressed me, I was ready to essay my stuff. 

I dispensed, however, with my notes and preconceptions right off. The group had its own motor, just like a good production onstage does. I talked. We talked. The questions and remarks by classmembers were intelligent, informed, energetic ... And Marion’s occasional prompting kept me from wandering out into the far trees of self-enactment in the guise of thoughtful presentation. 

What did I think of Future Me? Of Wakefield or Argonautica? All that was easy—and fun; I’d seen, thought about and written on each. And there never is enough space on newsprint to capture the outsized dimensions of that thought, much less the gear it’s clothed in. 

What was harder to describe was being asked to detail the reviewing process. I watch plays, not myself watching plays, or maybe just enough to catch my own mannerisms and the faintest hunches about what’s going on onstage. 

Still, when queried, a lot of subliminal stuff came flooding back. Like an athlete watching a game he was in on tape, it was a revelation, maybe even a readjustment. 

The two hours went by quickly. Critics are supposed to be glib. Guess I got a vocation, after all. 

The generosity of the class and teacher conquered me. I’d put out that old truism about theater being the most social of the arts, and discovered again what a broad community that was, with such depth. 

Leaving, after passing through a few knots of after-hours discussion in the hallway and outside, I had the once-familiar, though never familiar enough, sensation going offstage to an audience’s applause. And I hadn’t forgotten my lines.