It's over -- finally, sadly. I was fortunate enough recently to work backstage in the Palace Theater's production of Peter Pan. I flew people on cables, built sets, painted flats, enmeshed myself in the satisfying craziness that is the theater.
I've done a fair amount of acting, singing, and dancing, and I've always found it a lot of fun. But working backstage this time, rather than "frontstage," gave me another look at the mysteries of the theater. The "frontstage" mysteries come from the "magic" of making an audience believe that muslin and wood and paint and lights are more solid and more pointed than ordinary reality so that the production can expose the audience to the poetry that is underneath the prose of life. For the few hours of the play we get taken out of the common, and the common gets taken out of us, and we get to see ourselves from a fresh, or at least a slightly refreshed, perspective.
But when you work backstage you become privy to all the bones that hold up the flesh of the production. You work long hours wrestling with a viper's nest of physics problems in order to make things appear as if they've simply "appeared," to make the magic look like magic and not the creaking machinery that it really is. You realize that the magic of the theater depends almost entirely upon the audience's ignorance or amnesia about the fact that the well-crafted presentation, and the skilled presenters, are really jury-rigged rube goldbergs of pulleys and screws and personal quirks. I remember learning this sharply during the first theater production I was in. The lead performer, who had just finished a riveting scene onstage, come into the wings cursing at the rude boob in the third row and telling a dirty joke to the stage manager. I was shocked to see that he was not the character in real life that he was onstage, shocked to see the framing under the façade.
One might think that all these doses of "reality" would be disillusioning, but they aren't. They deepen the magic by expanding its dimensions. For every "mystery" that's exposed as you sit in the wings, other mysteries take their places, mysteries about why, given all the sweat and tedium and dyspepsia that comes with doing a show, people still choose to stretch and angle themselves to receive that bath of light and applause, that moment of lift and completion, at the end of an evening's performance. Backstage I got to see people get their living together, braiding all their complaints and skills and points of view together to make a common moment of uncommon power. These aren't mysteries of contraption and light cues, but of recognition and purpose -- in short, of living itself. The best show is often the one the audience doesn't see.
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