You Can Too Go Home Again

Let me tell you about dancing.

No, that’s a terrible start. Let me tell you what I miss about being a dancer.

That’s worse. And come to think of it, it’s not what I want to write about.

Start over: I was backstage a couple weeks ago, hanging out with Phil at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, where TheatreWorks was presenting Merrily We Roll Along. (Just for the record, some rag just printed a comment that the definition of a theater queen is anyone who claims he has a fix for the book of Merrily. No comment—and those of you who received any of my emails discussing what I thought about this show when it opened can just keep your mouths shut, too.) We were at the theater because Phil had to make the curtain speech—you know, the sort of flight attendant welcome to the theater thing: exits are there and there, turn off your cell phones, please, please, please buy our tickets for next year, enjoy the show. While he did that, I was hanging out backstage, saying hi to some of the actors.

One of the really nice things about TheatreWorks is that Phil is more intimately involved with the actual productions than managing directors at other theaters sometimes are. And the TheatreWorks crowd seems to believe that I have some actual role in the company, too, so people talk to me instead of looking at me sideways like I’m in the way. So this night, I was trying to stay out of the way, and chitchatting with whoever came by, and I inevitably began to think about my own stage career, and the things I miss from it.

Everybody with me now? Good. We’re talking about things I miss, what makes me feel all sad and nostalgic when I’m visiting theaters. I wish I could write about my actual career and how wonderful it was— if you want a good picture of what dancing and production shows were like in the good ol’ days, go read Larry McMurtry’s novel The Desert Rose. It’s a terrific story and the best representation of dancing in Vegas I’ve come across, on both practical and emotional levels. I’ve never been able to convey that, much as I’ve tried and wish I could.

But I can tell you what I loved about working and spending much of my life in theaters. Not “theatre”, a word proclaimed in stentorian tones while holding a skull and staring meaningfully off at the sunset. Theaters. I love theaters. I love being in them. I love every part of them, especially during the day or after the show, when the public is not invited. When the audience is there, theaters can be anything. In Las Vegas, I danced in numbers that were set in Africa, Japan, outer space, the circus, and Bible history, to name just a few. Those theaters became time machines, TVs, gargantuan pagan temples, transports to entirely unknown worlds.

But outside of show hours, they’re just themselves. They’re great big, empty boxes with terribly dusty drapes hanging along the edges, and big clunky weights and hundreds of feet of cables rattling down the side walls. And that’s the time I really love them. I can’t tell you all the reasons why. But coming into a theatre before a show starts is like loading the car before a trip that you’re really excited about—it’s full of anticipation, and wonder at what might happen, who you might see; it’s full of possibilities. Add to that the nervousness of pre-performance, the running checklist that’s always active in a dancer’s head about how much sleep he’s had, how his body’s feeling, if he’s eaten the right amount and at the right time to hit his peak of energy at the right time, whether he’s going to dance anything new that night, etc., etc., and you get a pretty exciting, energized scene. And the theater itself, well, it’s great, and big, and unworried; it’s hosted other shows before this one and will host many more after; dozens or hundreds of other dancers have passed through its doors, run onto its stage, rehearsed and performed and triumphed and failed in it. It has history, which you’re now a part of. It allows you in, it shares itself with you, when you’re working in it. Theaters, when you’re a dancer (or, no doubt, an actor, or a singer, or whatever) are your Mecca, your cathedrals, and your home, in a very real sense. As a stage performer, you may never put down roots in the sense of buying a house or much furniture. But every time you step into a new backstage, are welcomed into a new surrogate family and begin learning its idiosyncrasies, its rules and expectations, its mythology and history, you’re sort of home again.

How poetic is that, I ask you? And the shocking thing is, I pretty much believe it, regardless of how sentimental and hackneyed it sounds. Perhaps this whole theater-as-home thing is why I’ve struggled so much with feelings of rootlessness since leaving Vegas and quitting dancing ten years ago. Not only have I only rarely lived in apartments I actually liked since then, I’ve also not had the foundation of a performing family, a shared space, to fill the gap. Heaven knows during the years I was dancing, I lived in lots of places I didn’t like, and never felt particularly injured by that. But now where I go home to is a huge deal, and I get way too worried about the annoying, pedantic little details of life, like how many square feet I rent and how convenient my neighborhood is. It’s a real pain, I’ll tell you. Life was much easier when that sort of stuff didn’t matter.

The old saying is, You can’t go home again. And I understand what that means. When I go back to some of the specific theaters I worked in now, I usually end up feeling maudlin and disappointed, because things have changed, or the theaters are dark, or in some cases they’ve been completely destroyed. But on the other hand, any time I walk into any theater, I get some taste of home. It bothers me that I don’t really have a place there, anymore, that I have to concentrate on staying out of the way, and while the actors at Phil’s theaters are nice and friendly to me, I have to stay in the dressing room hallway rather than going with them into the wings, where it’s dark and friendly, because I’m not one of us anymore. I don’t belong there, I have no purpose. Because I’m no longer a performer, my place is in the audience, if anywhere. But home still exists, and I do get a taste of it sometimes, thanks to my useful partner. And I get to glance into those wings, and get a nod of recognition from the stage manager, and that’s a nice thing. I may not live at home, anymore, but it’s good to know it’s still there.