Tonight marks the end of an era for many of my friends and I. It’ll be our last evening spent rushing around trying to find stockings in the dark, our last evening speaking quickly in hushed voices so the stage manager won’t hear, our last evening stepping out under the hot stage lights as someone entirely separate from ourselves – our last evening of our last theatre production as high school students.
Our last evening because many of us will be graduating.
Of course, there will be more productions after we’re gone. Maybe some of us grads will get together and come back to our home, our stage, and watch the younger students who’ve made their way up through the ranks put on productions and do Sightlines Theatre proud.
After all, how many theatre grads have come to see our shows? How many times have we been accosted as we leave for the night by a former theatre student, teary-eyed, telling us how wonderful it was to see other passionate students out on the stage?
Oh, tonight many tears will be shed by smiling faces. The end of a show is always emotional, but tonight is different for my Grade 12 friends and I. Tonight makes graduation feel real, because, while we can always visit, and maybe even find ourselves another theatre family to join, we will never be back on the stage where we were tonight.
Tonight we say goodbye.
My friends and I have pushed through an entire production, and The Diary of Anne Frank has been wonderful to work on.
Now that it’s over, we don’t have the thought of looming shows to tie us down and keep our emotions in check. Now, we have to face the reality that once the seven o’clock show is over, the curtain will fall and end an era for all the Grade 12s.
I’ve been in theatre long enough to know that the 12s always cry at the end of the last show. There’s crying, and hugging, and quite often the director gets us cake because she knows there’s going to be crying. Now it’s my turn to be one of the crying 12s, and it’s my turn to say my goodbyes to high school theatre.
It will be the first of many goodbyes in the next few months as we get ready to leave Thomas Haney for whatever comes after. I’ll be able to visit the theatre until then, exchange jokes with ‘Spooku,’ our resident theatre ghost. But in June, there will be a parting. A parting from theatre, a parting from my teachers, a parting from my friends.
The actors will hang their costumes up on the racks. The crew members will shake the theatre dust off their black ensembles, but they won’t change because black is always fashionable.
For most of the kids, it’s just the last show before the summer, but for the Grade 12s, it’s the last show before the rest of our lives. High school is a stepping-stone between childhood and everything that comes after.
Leaving high school is leaving the last bastion of childhood.
I’m talking about theatre, because theatre is where I’ve found my niche in high school. Saying goodbye to the theatre is like saying goodbye to a part of myself, but a part that I hope to find again in other theatre groups as I move forward.
Still, Sightlines Theatre – my theatre – is where I’ve grown up and come into my own. It’s the same feeling an athlete might have saying goodbye to their home field after their last season before moving on to the college ranks.
Tonight, gathered around the round tables of Thomas Haney’s rotunda, after all of the show’s paraphernalia has been put to bed, there will be a group of grads, those not openly crying, with misty eyes looking around at what will be their last wrap-up party with students they’re proud to call not only friends, but family.
Theatre is a family.
As we leave, we’ll hand the torch off to the next set of players and the next set of crews.
Tonight, once everyone has got out of costume, back into street clothes, peeled off layers of stage makeup, pulled at least 80 bobby pins from their hair, and hung up their backstage flashlights for what may likely be the last time – we will say our first goodbye.
Marlowe Evans is a senior student at Thomas Haney and head delegate of the Model UN Delegation who writes about youth issues.
