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Theatre Family: The Ultimate Acceptance

I quit football in high school. I was the chubby kid in the corner who liked sports, but ultimately quit something I was good at but was not passionate about.

By Kevin RothlisbergerPublished 6 years ago 6 min read
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A photo from San Juan College's production of The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by Mollie Mook-Fiddler. Pictured from left to right is Leigh Irvin, Kevin Tschetter, Brynna Matthews, Alice Irvin, Madison Ballard, me (Kevin Rothlisberger), Rebecca Krebbs, and Nick Michaels. A group of my theatre family that I'm so grateful for. 

The year was 2005 when I quit football (for the second time) at my high school. My once "brotherhood" quickly turned against me and said some pretty hateful things. To this day I still regret it and I didn't think I'd find anything else I was good at doing. I am a 6'2", 290lbs guy, and in high school I was 6'2" and weighed close to 275, so my size gave me a pretty good advantage at sports. Sports were what I felt like I should do. My first love was baseball, and while I was passionate about it, I just wasn't that great of a baseball player, and it took me a long time to accept that. Next came basketball, which I became my best at in comparison to my peers when I was in about the 5th grade, and then I just plateaued. Football was the next sport I tried, because I felt very much invited and encouraged and motivated from other football coaches to play (I mean, like I said before, I was the chubby kid in the corner).

So, with my blogs I try to approach it like an essay. Including a statement on which to base the post. I'm struggling to find the words to use to describe appropriately how I feel about being accepted into my theatre family. I'll say that a theatre family is accepting, hard-working, and empathetic.

Accepting. As I've stated before, after I quit football, I was exiled in high school. I was involve with a sport I was doomed to fail at (baseball) and any close friends I had were quick to dismiss me after I quit football. It took me moving away from my home town to go to a college, then come back to finally give theatre a try. I first want to give props to my brother, Colt, who actually always told me he thought I'd do well in theatre. He DID do theatre in high school, whereas I did not. So I took an Intro to Theatre class at a small community college, San Juan College located in Farmington, NM. I remember walking into the classroom that day. The class was held in a black box (a space used in the theatre realm for rehearsing and low-key performances). I walked in and the whole room was painted black. As I scanned the room one or two times, hoping I'd have a classmate I knew, I saw a beaming aura sitting in a red chair. She held a styrofoam coffee cup stained with red lipstick in one hand and a pen in the other as she was discussing the previous class with a student. She then asked us to take our seats and introduced herself, "My name is Mollie..." I honestly don't feel like she was a stranger before we met, but she taught the class with such dedication and love that I looked forward to that class everyday. About a week or so went by, and Mollie asked me to audition for a show the college was doing that semester. The play was James and the Giant Peach. She then explained that I wouldn't need to memorize a monologue, but that I could do a "cold read" from the script instead. I auditioned and awaited the news of my casting. I got a part! I was casted as the Centipede: a shrewd, beast of a character. Mollie then took me in as if I were her lifelong friend. You can ask anyone that ever met or worked with Mollie; she was a person of angelic demeanor and fierce passion (she passed on in November of 2016, she will get a blogpost from me in the future). It was there I met James (see my previous post about technicians in theatre), Ed (also in previous post), and several actors that I grew to cherish so much. Gone were the days when I was judged of being a "quitter." Gone were the days when I was expected to be something or someone I didn't feel comfortable being. Theatre, as I knew it, accepted me and allowed me to be loud and goofy. But being in a children's show also required a LOT of hard work and "larger than life gestures" as Mollie would say.

Hard-working. I enjoy working hard. Farm work, manual labor, building fences are all things I have done working with my family on a farm or helping others, not their farms. But I've never spent more hours dedicated to a single job or a single project like I have with theatre. And it helps a lot to have people you care about working beside you (trust me, when comparing having worked on shows with people you DON'T care about vs. having worked on shows with people you DO care about there's a BIG difference). Usually during the rehearsal process you are rehearsing for around 3–4 hours a day, every day for at least a month. Then, during tech week, it's not that uncommon to have a 5–6 hours rehearsal to make sure costumes, lighting, and set are all in good order. With the amount of personal time one spends memorizing lines, cues, and set changes, the number of hours spent becomes countless. When you rub shoulders with people for those long hours, a special bond is formed. The act of entertaining with other people for other people really brings a strong rapport and sense of camaraderie that you rarely get anywhere else. I truly enjoy having members of my theatre family that are of different religions, ethnicities, genders, and belief systems. And that sense of belonging comes from long hours of repetitive actions and movements. Dancing, spitting, yelling, and several other human emotions are presented in theatre and some of those things don't come without hair-splitting repetition and practice of the art. It then makes going to see other productions even more enjoying than before being in a play/musical.

Empathy. Acting with others sometimes requires you to put yourself in the shoes or life of someone else. Becoming a character requires one to dig deep down, on occasion, to find a particular emotion or thought process you didn't know was there before. And there is something almost spiritual about sharing that process with another individual over and over and over again. In James and the Giant Peach, there was a GIANT wooden peach that the actors had to climb up, down and all around throughout the play. Doing that action of climbing up and down caused such a strong bond between the actors, and took countless numbers of hours practicing the moves up and down that Peach. Same can be said of other memorable experiences you find in theatre: rehearsing a difficult scene that requires strong emotions, delving into world for an audience to see, and performing art for others is such a rewarding and transpiring event(s).

I'll close but stating and inviting anyone who has not experience theatre to do so. Audience member, actor, technician, choreographer, director, or producer are all members of the theatre family where accepting, hard-working and empathetic people await you. Thanks for reading!

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About the Creator

Kevin Rothlisberger

An aspiring actor from Farmington, NM writing a blog about theatre. Currently living in Eagle Mountain, UT. If I happen to make a dollar or two while doing so, so be it. Thanks for reading! Break a leg!

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