My sophomore year of high school, I saw two musicals in the same year. The first was A Chorus Line, on a double date with friends. The second was Man of La Mancha.
I came by my love of the form honestly. My mom was a theater kid, in high school and in college, and she made sure my brother, sisters, and I were exposed to the art form whether we asked for it or not. My dad was considerably less enthusiastic about the genre, which meant taking us to see shows fell almost entirely to her. I never wanted to be on stage myself (despite a turn as Otto Frank in an eighth-grade production of The Diary of Anne Frank), but in high school I worked crew — sets, lights, props. Our school put on Godspell my junior year, and I spent more evenings than I can count in that theater without ever saying a word from the stage. I didn't mind. Something about being in the building when a show comes together suits me better than the spotlight.
In college, I took a history of musical theater course to fulfill a humanities breadth requirement. The kind of course you sign up for because you need the credit and stay for because it turns out to be the best class of the semester. It connected my love of history to something I'd always enjoyed without being able to say why. Musicals, at their best, are documents. They tell you what a culture was worried about, what it needed to believe, what it wanted to hear sung back to it.
I never lost the thread. Man of La Mancha has been with me since that sophomore year. My mom put me in that theater. I don't know if she understood what she was handing me — probably she just loved musicals and wanted her son to love them too. But something about Don Quixote settled into me at fifteen and shaped how I've looked at things ever since. The willingness to see what you choose to see. The refusal to stop before you're finished.
Which is why, forty-some years later, I took Faith to Pasadena on a Saturday afternoon. And why I wrote the check for the summer program. You can't give a kid what a single experience gave you. You can only open the door and hope the right thing is waiting on the other side.
A Noise Within, on Foothill Boulevard in Pasadena, was running a production. It's a serious theater, a repertory company that takes classic texts seriously and draws audiences who come to be moved. Faith had been on stage in church Christmas pageants, high school productions, and at summer acting camps before, but this was different. This was the two of us, and a story I'd carried for forty years.
She loved it. This didn't surprise me.
Faith is a theater kid the way my mom was a theater kid — the way some people just are, from the beginning, without needing to be talked into it. She's done every school production available to her and made no secret of wanting to pursue acting professionally. As a freshman, she told her mother and me that college was probably unnecessary, since she planned to move to Hollywood and become an actor. We had many conversations (and therapy sessions) about that. She came around on college. She has not come around on acting.
What Man of La Mancha did that afternoon was confirm something she already knew about herself. I watched her watch the stage. I recognized the look.
A few weeks later we signed her up for Summer With Shakespeare, A Noise Within's youth acting program. Six weeks of real work: movement, language, stagecraft, the business of what professional actors actually do. Not drama club. Not a school showcase. She came home from each session exhausted and talking faster than usual.
Following the program, the theater held auditions for their fall season. One of the productions was A Tale of Two Cities. Faith auditioned. She got cast.
She plays a member of the mob. It's not a large role. But it is a professional one, in a real production at a theater that gets reviewed. The show runs through November. Her first professional credit.
A Noise Within ran a short interview with her on their website. She told them: "This is my first time in a professional production. I want to be an actress, and having the experience of working with Julia and Geoff [Elliott] and also with all the other super talented actors on stage is the very best part." She also said something I keep returning to: "If I had not participated in the education programs at ANW, I would never have had the chance to audition."
That sentence is the whole argument, as far as I'm concerned. You can't hand a kid a dream. What you can do is put them somewhere the dream becomes possible. You take them to see the show. You pay for the summer program. You drive them to auditions. Then you get out of the way while they figure out whether this is who they are.
Maybe she becomes an actress. Maybe she doesn't. What I know is that this fall she's standing on a professional stage for the first time, working alongside trained actors, learning what the work actually requires. She got there because a door opened, and she'd been given the tools to walk through it.
Don Quixote spends the whole play insisting the world is not what the world insists it is. The play doesn't ask you to agree with him. It asks what it costs to stop.
For today, I'm not going to be the one to tell her the windmill is a windmill.
You can read the interview A Noise Within did with Faith on their website. A Tale of Two Cities runs through November 19th. Go see it.
Editor's Note: In a more recent post, I wrote about how my mom's love of musical theater, my time on stage crew, and those years sharing shows with Faith all came together around a very different kind of theatrical tradition. You can read it here: Liberty in Three Acts.
