It’s pronounced "Drama" Club: Healing Theatre Trauma and Leading the Next Generation of Leads

by Anna Frances, Guest Editorial

It’s opening night of Moana Jr. Earlier today, I showed up at the auditorium two and a half hours before curtain, grabbed a hot glue gun, and got to work on eighteen last-minute accessories that I had decided only this morning the kids couldn’t go without. Within 90 minutes, all 18 headdresses were tied onto 18 little heads, and I marched towards the house to greet our many guests. This may not be a customary practice for a costume director, but certainly for a member of the theatre board, which I happen to be.

I was about five hello-thank-you-for-comings in when I felt my internal body temperature begin to rise, and another two deep when I decided, without a second thought, that it was time for me to go home. I headed backstage to alert my director, to which she gave a thumbs up and a “happy anniversary”, and then I was out the door.

I am now laying in bed, laughing to myself as I send my friends homemade “Opening Night Fever” memes. It’s kind of an odd anniversary to be acknowledging: almost exactly four years (and many lifetimes) ago, during one of the last times I found myself opposite an audience, my seventeen-year-old self was set to open a lead role that I had spent the previous 12 weeks tirelessly preparing for. I was obsessed with theatre-making at the time, and thus had refused to let a little thing like the stomach flu stop me from walking onstage that night.

I pushed through three performances with that illness, 360-degree flips and nausea-inducing belting included. Post production, I was so proud of my “accomplishment.” I talked about the feat for months, recounting where my fevers were at during every performance, and how many improv-based contingency plans I had set in place with my scene partners, just in case I had to puke mid-scene.

I now look back and wonder where I would have drawn the line; how ill would I have had to have been to say no to going onstage that weekend? I can’t even conceive a single boundary that I would have been willing to set between myself and that role. Of course, in a post-covid theatre world, my board now sets firm health-related boundaries for our student actors. During last year’s Frozen Jr., our Anna and Elsa caught the virus two weeks before opening night, and we simply delayed the show, no questions asked. The world, in that respect, is a different place.

But what about other types of boundaries? I now recognize that I wouldn’t let anything stand between myself and my coveted lead because I had already spent that entire production season refusing to draw boundaries in any respect. I recently reread the script from that show, and I was shocked by all of the sexually suggestive dialogue that my character had. I asked a fellow board member (who had also led that cast with me) how he felt looking back at that script.

“Can you even imagine,” I said, “putting our students on that stage and asking them to read those lines?”

“Of course not; who would we even cast?”

“Ourselves. These are adult roles. We would cast ourselves.”

It’s a firm and strict line to draw. The show was one that is commonly done by high schools across the world. Rethinking that experience is a heavy challenge to a globally established status quo.

Now, I’m not naive to the fact that I currently have many students who would be willing to take on those roles, many without a second thought. But it isn’t my job, as a director, to hold jurisdiction over that part of a minor’s self expression, even if it comes in the form of a scripted role. Because I remember being uncomfortable performing those lines, but I had been chosen to read them over dozens of other girls. If a casting board of adults thought I was ready, then I was ready. Actors, especially young female actors, aren’t trained up in a theatrical culture of saying no. That word is not in our wheelhouse.

So much has changed in my life since that performance. I left my little community theatre for a four semester stint as an anxiety-ridden university theatre major, in a department where I never managed to feel safe enough to spread my wings and fly. In a (since successful) attempt to recognize myself again, I dropped out of the program and returned to my roots, just in time to snag an opening on my hometown theatre board and jump on the production team for our first post-pandemic show. It was the same organization that I had loved working with during high school, but this time I was in the driver’s seat.

What followed my board induction was a year's worth of aha moments, as I began to see so much of my younger self in my student actors. I looked back on so many shows at so many theatre troupes, and I couldn’t fathom placing a single one of my students in any of the production experiences that I held so tight to throughout my childhood. Over a decade of obsession was now tainted by memories of various scenarios in which myself and my peers lacked what we needed most: a strong self-esteem and an adult to advocate for us.

The more I unpacked my theatre trauma, the more I became fiercely protective of my students. Last spring, I helped to develop our organization's first safeguarding policy, which details and forbids examples of artistic abuse. When I made my directorial debut this past summer, I announced at our first rehearsal that George Gibbs and Emily Webb would not be kissing at their wedding. Not even a stage kiss, not even if they had been willing, or even if, for some reason, my actors had asked.

There’s a new culture in my theatre, one that’s based around a singular principle: The first step in our work isn’t to train up actors who can advocate for themselves. That’s the second step. The first step is to create scenarios where self-advocacy isn’t necessary.

Last week, my co-instructor and I broke the news to our after-school drama club that our summer 2023 show would, for the first time ever, only be auditioning adults. They begged for a reconsideration, many insisting they were fine to read “a few dirty jokes.” “But it isn’t our job to teach them to you,” we said. “This isn’t called a trauma club.”

Our students are annoyed right now and will be for a while. But that’s okay because one day, they’ll be able to walk right out the stage door on opening night with a 101-degree fever, fully accepting that what they need at that moment is acetaminophen, not applause.