In the Wings, Part Two

And then it’s opening night (day, actually). You have a lot of work to do in the front of the house—briefing the ushers, answering questions, directing everyone to their dressing rooms, greeting the school groups and teachers—before double-timing it backstage, getting into your costume, distributing tasks to volunteers and collecting payments from the school groups who have reserved for the performance. Then you go back upstairs and cross behind the curtain because you are the one making the welcoming remarks and reading the synopsis of the ballet. The stage lights go out, the music rises in the darkness, and your heart races. It’s started before you know it, and you know there is nothing you can do but go on, that your cue is about to come up, that the woman playing Clara’s mother is miming to you as Clara’s Father to enter. Which you do. You’re moving onstage for the first time since the high school production of Auntie Mame. You’ve learned your gestures, your blocking, your two dances, and you begin to realize that the scene is going by much, much faster than it did in any rehearsal. Then you and the woman playing your wife are dancing stage front and center, and then you’re back against the wall again. You help Grandmother offstage. With that, your part onstage is done.
But not your part backstage. No, that is just beginning. You have a lot to do. You have to help drag the sofa into the wings during the fight between the Soldiers and the Mice. You have to keep the kids away from the side lights, so that the audience doesn’t see them. Now it’s intermission, and you have to help untie heavy canvas drops and roll them up and out of the way: the clock is ticking, you’re hands and fingers fly across the bar, and you feel like a crew member in the America’s Cup. You can’t look around; there’s so much going on you’ll get distracted. It’s like the worst restaurant rush you’ve ever seen, multiplied by ten. As the call for curtain is made, you hustle offstage and the second act begins. It’s less frenetic than the first, and you can actually watch some of the dancing. But you help pull Clara’s sled into the wings, and push Mother Ginger out in her five-foot-tall hoopskirt-and-stilts costume. When the soundman jostles the CD player (your humble troupe can’t afford a live orchestra, not yet) and the soloist has to improvise, you are enthralled and astonished and proud because she does so, like a pro. And you realize the Nutcracker doesn’t have to be what it was to you for so long, a piece of kitsch that came ‘round once a year like the Oscars. In fact, the ballet will never look—or sound—the same to you again.
The curtain closes and you hear the applause, and you know that part of it is yours. You still have work to do: organizing costumes. Where are the props for the first scene? And why is that crewman sitting down? Up! UP! There’s work to do. And when you next look out into the theater, it’s empty. Everyone’s gone home. There may be some little kid who thought the whole thing a waste of time, boring, stupid, and what was up with those guys and their crotches? He’s the one who’ll become you. But for each one of him, there’s a boy or a girl who might take this production to heart, who will believe—who wants to believe; needs to believe—in magic. He or she has no idea who you are, or what part you played, and there is no reason to know. Sure, eventually every artist needs to learn how to take art apart to see how it works. By and large, that’s for critics. Not dreamers. And you are still a dreamer.