Further Thoughts on Community Arts

This post is a follow-up to In Praise of Community Arts

My promo photo from the
local community theatre

“Hey, Kevin,” Brad said, sticking his head in the door of my office. “I saw you in the show on Friday. I didn’t know you were an actor!”

“Thanks,” I said back with a smile, leaning back in my chair. “I thought you knew that was why I couldn’t have a beer that afternoon.”

“I guess I just didn’t put two and two together until I saw your name in the program. We go to the community theatre from time to time, but we usually don’t know anybody in the show.”

When I worked in the field, my coworkers often knew I was an amateur actor. They understood that I couldn’t stay late or pull overtime because I had a rehearsal or show tonight, and had people depending on me to be there. But they also never attended the show; they begged off, saying they couldn’t afford tickets (theatre is admittedly not cheap) or that they had family responsibilities. They knew I acted, they just never saw me do it.

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town was my first performance since I got promoted to office work earlier this year. It also marks the first time any co-workers have recognized me onstage. It makes me conscious of my own relationship with actors and performances. Somebody who knows me from work, knows that I frequently cuss, have a precarious relationship with deadlines, and put my feet on the desk while I think. How do they respond to me acting?

Dr. Djoymi Baker, professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, has written that actors who become associated with a particular role, become a sort of “intertext,” an external commentary upon their own work. She specifically cites actors from Star Trek appearing in non-franchise roles: Bill Shatner in Boston Legal, or George Takei and Nichelle Nichols in Heroes. On some level, Dr. Baker writes, actors never cease their most famous roles.

What happens, though, when an actor’s most famous “role” isn’t performance? In Our Town, our central characters, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, were played by a married couple, a dispatch operator for a local haulage company and his stay-at-home wife. Most actors are students or skilled professionals, including local doctors and technicians. As you’d expect, the local university is overrepresented, including both students and faculty.

Jeff Ensz, left, as George Bailey, and me as Clarence Odbody, in
Kearney Community Theatre's 2017 production of It's a Wonderful Life

Everyone involved in community theatre, both onstage and backstage, has another local profile. When a famous TV actor appears in a play or movie—when, say Doctor Who’s David Tennant and Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart appeared together in Hamlet—they carry other acting roles into their current position. But when we amateurs appear onstage, the roles we carry reflect our outside responsibilities: doctor, lawyer, student, carpenter.

Further, as anybody who’s ever done community theatre knows, the companies are often in-groupish and clubby. A small handful of participants generally get lead roles and artistic direction credits. They might become locally famous, but they never stop being, say, a highly respected philosophy professor or radiologist. (Let’s just say.) They always have this duality, this contrast between their daily selves and their current onstage performance.

Experience tells me this goes both ways. Almost four years ago, when I still worked in the field, my company had a frequently contentious relationship with a client, a local dentistry firm. The company and the client argued frequently, and lawyers got involved. Then, late in the contract, I got assigned to the job. Tensions diminished almost immediately as several members of the client group recognized me from a recent performance of It’s a Wonderful Life.

I’d become a genuine local celebrity.

The term parasocial relationship has become common in internet parlance when audiences have deep personal affinity for public figures—YouTube celebrities and Instagram “influencers,” for instance. But community arts brings this home. We have parasocial relationships with community actors and directors, local gallery artists, pub musicians. And we have literal social relationships with these people through their day jobs and community involvements.

We local celebrities (ahem) also become what Dr. Baker calls “intertexts.” Except, rather than commenting on other acting roles, we comment upon social roles: jobs, families, congregations, and spending habits. When Brad stuck his head into my office, he was speaking to Kevin Nenstiel, apprentice proposal writer. But he was also talking to Simon Stimson, the passionate but drunken choir director at Grovers Corners Congregational Church.

When people see me on stage, they see my character, but they also see me. They’re conscious that the events portrayed are scripted, controlled, directed. Yes, they’ve looked at me and seen Simon Stimson, Clarence Odbody, Captain Lesgate, or Nathan Radley. But they’ve also seen me, and because of that, they’ve seen themselves. The relationship is difficult, nuanced, and strange. I haven’t figured it all out yet. But by golly, I love learning about it.