Megan Tuennerman
A&E Editor
It is a Thursday night, you have your homework done and you look for something to do. You look at the weekly schedule and see there is a show going on in Freedlander Theatre! You head on over and watch your peers become new people onstage. They make it seem so effortless — but it isn’t. While your choice to walk into that theatre was quick and easy, the work that has gone into that show was neither. Behind the scenes is a whole other world from the one we see, one of long hours, intense care and precision. A world that deserves recognition. Without it, the art of theatre could not exist.
Often times, whether it’s a show that makes us laugh, cry, sing along to the music or all of the above, we go to the theatre to forget our lives and fall into the lives of the characters onstage. It’s so easy to do that that we forget the work that it takes to captivate an audience. From the sets, to the actors, to the costumes, to the tech, creating a world from scratch is no easy task.
Brian Luck ’22, one of the students currently working on “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime” here at Wooster, stated that, while the process for every show is different, it generally starts when “the director and designers do a ton of research before anyone else even gets involved.” After that is the slightly more visible work of auditions and casting the show (at least, work that is visible to those of us that check our email). After that, the actors have to research and understand who their characters are. All of this happens before they even set foot on the stage. Once onstage, the actors and director work together to clean up the staging of the show — with some trial and error, until finally the scripts are left behind and the lines are memorized. The last push, according to Luck, is “tech week” where it “will be crazy with longer rehearsals and added lights, sound, crew members and costumes. Finally, we open to the public and get to share our work with an audience, which is by far the best part.” Luck stated how this show especially involves a lot of research as the main character is a teenager with autism, and so “we’ve done a lot of research on people with autism so that we can portray Christopher [the main character] as accurately as possible.”
We all know how hard it is to balance school work and activities, and it is easy to forget the work that goes into the different events here on campus. The actors on stage make performing look so effortless, it is easy to forget that they are students like us. Students who, on top of learning who they are, are creating who their characters are and the best way to do them justice in telling their story.
So, when you have that free Thursday night during the run of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime,” make sure you go take a seat and fall into the world of Christopher, but also remember the work that has gone into this production so that you can enjoy your night off.