BWW Blog: Emma Mueller - A Little Bit of Spilled Paint

It was Monday afternoon, and the dismissal bell had just rung. I tried to clear my head as I said goodbye to my friends who were going home to nap and study for the impending math final. But, my mind wasn't preoccupied with derivatives or integrals. Rather, it had shifted gears completely from student to director. As I walked into rehearsal, my brain was fully focused on the PAINT that was SPILLED ALL OVER THE STAGE AND THE FLOOR.

In that moment, my quasi-confident, optimistic self was shoved out of the spotlight and my overly-paranoid self emerged. It was not even four minutes into our first tech week rehearsal for Willy Wonka, and things were already going askew. As an actor, I knew that this was going to be a dreadfully long week. But as a director? It would be even longer.

Leave it to theater kids to make the best of a bad situation; we did Annie last year, so there were plenty of "Hard Knock Life" jokes as we scrubbed at the paint on our hands and knees. After ten minutes, the previously messy surface shined like the top of the Chrysler Building.

Rehearsal continued like nothing had happened. This was the first day that we did a full run of the show with all of the moving parts. We were a not-so-well-oiled machine that screeched in between (and sometimes during) scenes. To sum it up, it was disjointed.

And to put the icing on the cake, this was the first day that I'd ever felt unsure about the actors. They seemed distracted, like they were dedicating more energy to getting used to the microphones and the lights and the costumes than actually performing.

I go to Biotechnology High School, a science-oriented high school that doesn't even have an auditorium. We get absolutely no funding for arts; everything is student-run and student-fundraised, so we knew going in that this musical was going to have a low production quality. We've always done the best that we can, but the highlight of our shows is always the cast. Today, my confidence was faltering a little bit. I wasn't finding the dialogue or the characters as amusing as they was before. The jokes weren't as funny. It seemed as if the actors weren't putting their hearts into it - like "hell week" had finally gotten to them.

In hindsight, I was definitely wrong; I've been in tons of shows and I know how stressful it is for every single person involved, especially those going up on stage. I know how easily the actors feel the director's pain. I was surprised at how quickly I'd forgotten that. During tech, it's easy to assume that nobody cares about the show as much as you do. It always seems like people aren't putting in all their effort. Sometimes I wonder how everyone would react if I just stopped caring.

But if I didn't put in 110% of my effort, how could I expect anyone else to? It's hard to remember that sometimes the journey is more important than the destination. It's a process, and it takes a long time. It's long and tedious and it definitely gets a little messy. Sometimes we all need to clean up a little bit of spilled paint.

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