Student Blog: Coming Full Circle
The End of my College Theatre Career
Welcome to my final article! I was hoping to get to eight articles, but my final two weeks of college were an absolute whirlwind, and as soon as I got home, the real world caught up to me in ways I never expected. I wasn’t sure if I was even going to try and get a final article up, but after surviving through the last two weeks, I need to finish what I started.
I began writing this article backstage while working on stage crew for my last show, a time where I was looking back on the past four years and started to notice all the coincidences and accidental miracles along my way, so I started to write them down. The path I’ve been down has been unexpected, but I wouldn’t trade a moment because it has built me into the theatermaker and person that I am today. This won’t be an exhaustive list, we’d be here for a very very long time if so, but these are some of the greatest hits from the last four years.
I began my time onstage in college replacing an ensemble track in a show that takes place in a small town in Ohio as part of “Heathers,” and I’ve officially ended my onstage college career in the same way. Albeit this time I wasn’t singing, but I was dancing, doing fight choreography and puppeteering ⅕ of a five headed dragon in “She Kills Monsters.”
“Heathers” came back into my consciousness a lot this year, starting with the Off-Broadway revival. I’ve also seen so many friends who were in Heathers around this year, whether being still at KU and active in ACT, or in the audience at our shows or spotted around campus or randomly at events. A lot of Westerberg graduates have come back to see me and our other friends in our senior shows at KU. And others came back to the stage for the first time since “Heathers.”
I firmly believe that the roles you are meant for, whether onstage or behind the scenes, will come to you when you most need them. This semester and year as a whole I was lucky enough to get onstage again and finally feel confident in myself as an actor.
I was in our student written show in the fall, “Adventures in Accounting,” and I played Codebreaker, the tech guy on the elite strike team trying to invade the Tungsten Cage and defeat the Crimson Beards. This show was a sequel to one written my freshman year, “A Horse Walked Into A Bar” where I played the announcer of a horse race and basically got to stand onstage and commentate on a pre-recorded race for five minutes. Playing the announcer unlocked something then, and earlier this year, Codebreaker set the floodgates open. I felt so cool and confident, and that weird little guy really healed something inside of me. That role was one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in college.
There are plenty of others. I started my time as a costumer also on “Heathers”, and I am ending the same way in “Company.” One of my other favorite things was how much my play, “Waystation,” came into the forefront in my final semester. In She Kills Monsters, the actor playing Orcus replaced one of the 90s show references with Waystation in rehearsal and it got such a great reaction that he changed the line for the entire run of the show, and it got huge reactions every night.
In theater things come in cycles. A lot of times theaters will cycle through shows, repeating good ones and allowing bad ones to become urban legends around the theater. Costumes, props and set pieces will come out of stock and bring their entire history with them. A freshman will enter the costume closet knowing nothing and leave as a senior with the full history of so many pieces of the clubs history as part of their being. This semester and year were incredibly full circle for me. I got to go back to so many roles I’ve loved and pass on what I know to so many incredible theater makers, and continue to do the things I love most with some of my favorite people.
Thank you for reading my articles this semester! Ever since I knew it was a possibility I wanted to be a student blogger for BroadwayWorld, and I’ve really enjoyed putting these articles out. It’s been a wonderful way to record some of my favorite moments in my senior year of college. Till we meet again!
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