I generally don't take the time to blog during the school year. Teaching Humanities, directing the middle and high school theatre programs and handling disciplinary issues as Freshman Dean tend to absorb all of my brain power and creativity. This past week was particularly noteworthy, however, so I'm going to muster what remains to document it.
Every tech week for a play comes with its own set of unforeseen challenges. One of the maddening, and beautiful, characteristics of theatre is that it is never entirely predictable. In many ways, a play becomes a living thing; pulsing with the energy and preparedness of actors and director, heaving breaths of lighting washes and set changes. This tech week for GET SMART was a maddeningly perfect example of what I'm describing.
Going into the week, I had some trepidation. This play has numerous sound cues and backstage voice-overs. Having had a bad experience with middle school sound techs in the past, I was nervous that the two seventh grade boys I'd allowed to run sound might completely flub it. My twenty-two actors, however, were right on track. Their characterization was on point and I wasn't worried about them. How surprised was I at our first tech rehearsal, then, to see my actors struggling and my sound guys rocking the board like little professionals?! Though I had set line memorization due dates before Christmas break, I had several actors on stage still calling line on Monday and Tuesday. For the first time in my ten years of directing, I had to caution actors that they would be carrying their scripts on stage for the performances if they could not pull it together by Wednesday night's final dress. Some of this lack of preparation was on these middle school actors, but some of it was also on me as their director.
I was a ball of nerves on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The Lord taught me a difficult lesson, for probably the hundredth time, about surrendering my pride and allowing Him to replace it with His strength. Christians in the performing arts regularly need this reminder! It's incredibly easy for the quality of a performance to be all about me and my students. But ultimately, the talents we have are endowed by our Creator. We can cultivate them, but without Him they wouldn't even exist. I am so thankful that God taught me this lesson again this week so that I could share it with my students. In Revelation 4, John describes the splendor of the 24 elders who take off their crowns and lay them down before bowing to worship God. This week my precious middle schoolers and I had the opportunity to lay down our crowns and let God have the glory He deserved.
It's truly amazing to witness what God does with a weak and humbled vessel. He worked miracles in my actors once we actively surrendered our efforts to Him. I went to bed on Wednesday night thanking Him for His goodness to me, only to wake on Thursday morning and find that our opening performance might be cancelled due to snow! I drove to school fervently praying that my kids would get to perform that night after the extremely difficult week we'd had. I thought I was still giving my anxieties and pride to God...and then the bottom fell out.
I got to school and immediately went to print and fold the play programs. As I was folding, a fine arts colleague rushed into the room exclaiming that our sound board was broken. She was going to see if her contact at a sound equipment company could fix it that day, but we weren't sure we'd have it back in time for the performance (if it wasn't snowed out). How was I supposed to train my two sound techs on a different board in less than 12 hours? I kept folding programs, fighting back tears, and prayed some more. God, surely You would not have brought us through this week's painful lesson only to allow our performances to be crippled?
It was raining Thursday morning. I placed my laptop on top of the programs in a cardboard box to make everything easier to carry back to my building. Somewhere between getting out the front door, balancing the box, holding an umbrella and gripping my thermos of hot tea, I managed to drop the thermos into the box. Not only were most of the 200 programs ruined, but my laptop case had filled with tea. I ran across campus in tears, looking for one of our IT folks to rescue my laptop. I found Dana and she pried my cover off. It didn't look like much tea got on the actual keyboard or screen, so she was confident that it would be fine if I could let it sit for a few hours powered down. Trying to communicate with my middle school principal who was in Florida about snow updates and whether or not to cancel the play suddenly became nearly impossible without instant access to email. I tried to keep busy and not freak out about my laptop, which contained all of our house music and sound cues for GET SMART. Surely the laptop was fine. I went back to reprint and refold the programs.
I returned to the IT office 20 minutes before my afternoon emergency rehearsal was to begin. My laptop wouldn't turn on. It had fried. I wanted to dissolve into a puddle on the floor. Potentially no sound board for that night's performance, and now definitely no laptop with sound cues. What in the heck was God up to?
I ran our afternoon rehearsal without sound. I began the rehearsal by explaining to my students everything that had transpired that morning. I asked them to pray with me, and I prayed quite candidly, stating that I had no idea what God was doing and no clue how things would come together but I knew He did. All we could do at that point was continue to trust completely in His provision. We had a terrific rehearsal, our best of the week.
By the afternoon, I made the decision not to cancel Thursday's performance but to move it up by 30 minutes so that the show would be over before rain was forecasted to turn to snow. Another of my dear fine arts colleagues picked up a new sound board for me to borrow and delivered it to me an hour before showtime. Dana, the IT goddess, took my laptop to the Apple store, had them strip off my hard drive, and configured a new laptop for me that she delivered to me after school. We suddenly had everything we needed working again.
I was certain we would have a light crowd on opening night, both because it was a school night and because of the wintery weather. I was slightly incorrect. We not only sold out the performance - we oversold it! The performance space seats 125, and the house count was 133 with extra chairs having been brought in and a few folks standing. My actors and crew alike pulled off a fantastic show. I was blown away.
Saturday night's performance was no different. Again, we oversold the show. I actually had to start turning people away after we'd squeezed 171 bodies into the performance space! The kids brought their performance to a level that made it truly the best middle school performance I've ever directed. Again, completely blown away.
A teacher and friend who has actually worked at both schools with me came to see the show on Thursday night. She laughingly mentioned that I needed to record the day's events because things had seemed so bleak all day and then the performance was such a success. How right she was. I needed to record the events surrounding GET SMART, not because they were quirky and unbelievable, but because they were completely infused with the presence of God. He was, in all the ways that mattered, the true director this week. And so I sit on my couch this morning, typing feverishly and marveling at the events of the past six days. Be encouraged, you who are reading this. Our God is sovereign over everything, the catastrophic and the mundane, big life decisions and middle school plays. He is good. He is faithful. I am grateful.
