Last month, I had occasion to visit Stagedoor Manor, the performing arts camp chronicled fictionally in the film Camp and truthfully in the film Stagedoor. Having seen the former film, I honestly did not know what to expect, but after spending all of one hour touring the campus, I was reminded not of the alternately fond and horrifying memories of my own theatre experiences in high school, but instead of my three years at the O’Neill Theater Center.
“Now there’s an odd cognitive leap,” I hear you say. Let me explain.
During my three years at The O’Neill, what many of us discovered is that what makes that fabled theatre development center so powerful is – forty years after its founding – not so much the works that are developed there (since, after all, work is developed in so many places and so many ways nowadays). The most compelling aspect of The O’Neill is the way in which it creates a community of diverse individuals who all come together to give birth to theatre, where everyone from the kids running the snack bar to the playwrights in residence want to immerse themselves in making theatre. In particular, because of its geographic remove and spotty cell phone service, The O’Neill functions as a theatre retreat (and I imagine places like Sundance do as well), where even jaded professionals are untethered from the details of their daily life just long enough to reconnect with the basic impulses that drove them into this field in the first place.
So at Stagedoor Manor, while I expected to be thrown back into my own adolescent reverie about theatre – the parts I didn’t get, the girls I wished I’d asked out – instead I found the spirit that was so powerful at The O’Neill. I recognized in almost instantly as I peeked into rehearsal halls and ate in the communal cafeteria.
I expected to be the jaded professional surrounded by idealistic, perhaps cloying or clawing kids all dreaming of their big break. Instead, I felt only camaraderie, and was reminded why I got into this business in the first place, and how much I adore the community that theatre creates with every production, with every company.
How much everyone could benefit from the purity of these theatre communities – especially after many years working in it day after day, where the impulse can be lost in the details, the dollars and the daily grind.
Posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
by
Howard Sherman
Filed under:
Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the
RSS 2.0 feed.
You can
leave a response, or
trackback from your own site.
Leave a Reply
July 24th, 2008 at 12:19 am
Howard, that was so wonderfully put. My daughter has been attending Stagedoor since she was 9. She began doing 2 sessions each summer when she turned 11 and is still going strong at 13. She loves it, and she has such a strong bond with the friends she has made there that it absolutely carries over into the school year. They go to each other’s parties and shows and support each other in a fashion I’ve not seen in any other environment. My daughter always says that her theater friends are the only ones she feels totally at home with and can share that inexplicable comraderie. These are the friends that will last a lifetime.