Drama, By Any Other Name

I never know what to call what I do.

Play, drama, show? Are we a club, a department, a company, a group? I never know the exact name, and it feels like it changes depending on the occasion. On my college applications I wrote "drama department" to make it sound official; in daily life I just say "I'm doing drama"; and with people who aren't really into theater, I say "shows." But they have always referred to the same thing: the little light booth in the corner of the auditorium.

Now I know the names of my groups much more clearly, but not the drama I used to know.

I still remember complaining to my friends, the first time I put my hands on the lightboard for The Giver, that the board was older than me. At my high school in China, the moving lights came with preset transitions, and I could follow, track, and create effects with the click of a button. At that time, a drama department like this was hard for me to imagine: on the one hand, the tech was so far behind; on the other, it was mostly students who were actually creating the show, and everything is taken so seriously at almost professional level.

Still, I was shocked when I attended the first full run-through. I watched this creation come out of nowhere, every part of it so perfectly done together. The stage is suddenly not the sum of its elements: lights, sound, props, sets, costumes, makeup, hair, or any individual cast member. I had seen each of these on its own, but when they fused together, the magic happened on stage. Every time, I think of the first full run-through as a milestone. Before it, each department does its own work, and we can add, take out, and revise any part of the show, like doing a lab or solving a math problem. Afterwards, the arithmetic doesn't work anymore. The show develops on its own, with the cast finding questions and all of us solving them together. It is just given over to God, and every problem starts sorting itself out.

Meetings between departments just happen naturally, everywhere, every moment. The curtain of the auditorium is always down, and inside that giant box things develop in a way no human can control. The power of creation just drags us along to keep filling in the bricks, feeding the world we are creating with more and more nutrients. At a certain point, everyone becomes part of this Art, and simultaneously we are also being shaped, transformed, and "created" by this Art. Even Oscar would willingly admit there is some magic during production week. During production week, I was always astonished by the creative power of humans, and by the Creation Power of God, who created the humans doing the creating.

One of my favorite times was the warm-up before each show. The cast would make weird sounds, say something funny (like a line from the play), or strike a pose from it. Then came the prayer, and I could listen to what every cast member was praying for, from the sixth graders new to drama to the senior veterans about to graduate. Those moments always made my heart beat faster. None of us was just doing part of the show anymore; together we were the show, and its soul rested on us. For a little while we had the power of creation: we could make a world and invite the audience to witness and experience it.

And the show itself was always busy. I read the document, followed the script, clicked "Go" at the right moment on the light board, and reminded the light crew to switch some lights on and off by hand, because our control system couldn't do it. Nobody called my cues for me. I called them myself, by watching.

But the magic didn't stay on stage. It continued offstage, in the dining hall, at the cast and crew party. I had never seen this kind of celebration after a production. All of us sat together, talked about what we had been through, and shared our thoughts. The party always ended with some silly games, and we all fell back into being normal human beings with lots of real-life problems to deal with. But in that moment, we had each other. Whatever came tomorrow, whether Symposium preparation or the quizzes and tests we had to make up because of production week, the world was just that part of the upper donut floor, the place we all spent so much time "living" in. We suddenly all became the community in The Giver: we could forget about the world outside, and there was only us, together, and our creation. And we knew there would always be the Giver, in heaven, remembering for us and empowering us with His ability to create.

I don't know which part of drama I liked most, and I don't know what to call this experience, but I am certain that this is drama, the drama I am so passionate about.

Now I am in two completely different groups: Witness Theater and the Barnstormers. Their names are listed clearly in the club directory, and there is no confusion at all. Everyone has a clear sense of identity; you won't find someone who has worked with a group for three years and still doesn't know what it's called.

They are also much more high-tech, even in the theater that is relatively older. Almost every light is LED, and I don't need to climb up to change gels anymore (the climb that always sank my proposal to use a gel scroller for The Merchant of Venice). Witness Theater has over 60 Source Four LEDs, plus dozens of backups we can hang on the catwalk. But something is different.

I was made assistant lighting designer for both groups' shows. Witness's fall show is made up of four distinct plays, and I was responsible for designing the lights for one of them, I Sette Dormienti.

My role as lighting designer also started in a very surprising way. I came in only three times, and then I was done (or was expected to be done) with the light script for the entire play I was designing. If I'm not also the board op, that is my whole job. Even by the end of production week, I still couldn't name the cast, even for my own play.

Even though the entire company has fewer than 40 students, we seldom had any company-wide meetings. What I missed most was the black box creation. First, it is not a black box anymore, because the theater has other uses even during production week. But mostly, I could never smell creation diffused in the air the way I did at BTA. Maybe 40 students is too small a number next to all of Hopkins. Maybe we just don't have that kind of communication, since everything is sent out as email reports.

Still, three visits were enough to make something. I Sette Dormienti is an interview: an old ballerina, Giuditta, and a young journalist in two chairs in a villa in Siena, in the year 2000. But Giuditta keeps falling back into wartime Italy, where her younger self travels with the Reaper. So the whole design became a conversation between two kinds of light. The present is a tight, high-angle ivory special on the two chairs, with the doors and the edges of the stage kept in cool darkness. The past is a soft straw-yellow wash over the whole stage. When the Reaper asks "What year is it?", the isolation opens into the wash, and the stage turns into memory. When the present interrupts at "Noon has passed," it snaps back to the two chairs, and the Reaper is left frozen in a sliver of cold backlight, waiting for the story to come back for her. For the Reaper's entrance, I waited for Giuditta's last word, "appeared," and dropped a tight circle of cold white light onto the back door, so that she is simply there, as if she had been standing in the dark the whole time. The longest cue of the play, thirty seconds, belongs to Giuditta's last story: the memory wash fades, a faint orange blind pattern rises like sunrise, the Reaper backs into the dark, and the whole transition has to land exactly on the word "asleep." Then everything falls away except one low warm special on Giuditta, and after three knocks at the door, blackout.

Witness has warm-ups too. The first one is always "Old Mother Leary," sung at walking pace, then faster, then faster again, until by the third round nobody is really singing. I usually watch it from the booth while I debug my lights. There is no prayer at the end. But I started keeping a list of the warm-ups and looking up where each one came from: a camp song, a radio audition, a comic opera, a limerick. Every one of them had been handed down mouth to mouth, by people who never knew each other's names. That was the moment I realized I was not just doing this show. I was standing in a circle where artists from different places and different times, with different thoughts and emotions, came together and manifested the human ability to create.

One thing I like about Witness Theater is that everything is student-written and student-produced, so it remains a truthful reflection of Johns Hopkins students. For example, the absence of religion, which was so present during my years at BTA. Or rather, religion isn't absent from these plays; the language of it is everywhere, but the students invent their own vocabulary for it.

Three of the four plays are about death and what comes after. All That We Got has a train to "Heaven," a conductor, and souls "cast in light," but no one to pray to. How to Talk to Aliens 101 stages X like a savior (the stage direction literally offers "like Jesus, take your pick") and then has X deny being a guardian angel. I Sette Dormienti gives death a body, a name (Thanatos), and a sleep schedule. Giuditta says outright that religion, beauty, and ambition are "twigs" that snapped. At BTA we prayed before every show. Here nobody prays, but the plays keep reaching for something to pray to.

I still find it a little ironic that the thesis of the whole fall show is a line from Ash in All That We Got: "This is just…one person being present for another person." Every play is two people in a confined space trying to reach each other: train compartments with a divider, a rooftop railing, an interview with a tape recorder between them, an ex across a kitchen counter. Four plays about presence, and I lit mine from the farthest seat in the house, behind glass, watching through a camera, speaking through a god mic. Our booth sits so high at the back of the theater that I can't just give a thumbs-up and resume the show anymore. At BTA I read the script and called my own cues; here, the stage manager talks to us through the mic, and I just press Go when she says so. I kept revising my cues so that Giuditta and the journalist could share the morning light together, the last morning of Giuditta's life, and yet I could not have told you the names of the two people standing in that light, nor could I call out to them if I passed them on campus in the morning sun.

The strike, however, was one of the few moments when I got to see every member of our cast. Because the theater is a public space, we have to take down everything (the set, the lights we hung, all of it) immediately after our last show, so we all worked together. Happiness and laughter were everywhere in the theater, and you could see characters from different plays, or characters who don't get along in their play, now joined in a delighted conversation. It's great to see so many different students, from different places (and one British international student) with so many different majors (actually most of students are engineer major).

We only had a party for the stage managers and tech crew. Not even all the designers came; we don't even know the names of the designers who skip production week. Everyone brought snacks or chips, and we baked a cake with salted butter, as a response to Slice of Life, where the characters ruin their cake because the salted butter makes the batter too salty. The party still ended in laughter, but it was never the same as the BTA cast party.

The second group, even though it isn't called a company, feels more like one to me. They use ten channels on Slack (the communication software most businesses use because it can automate things and give each project its own channel). There are many people managing it and making sure everything runs in order. We get a report email every day, and all communication goes through our faculty advisor, who manages tech at the weekly meeting. And it works: I always know what is happening, who is responsible, and where to find the answer. I haven't reached production week for Rumors yet, so I can't say anything about the play itself. That will be my next journal.

At Hopkins, the names are clear: Witness Theater, the Barnstormers, assistant lighting designer, board op. At BTA, I never knew what to call any of it, but I always knew what it was.

In How to Talk to Aliens 101, X's third question is "Who are you, Everest?", and no icebreaker fact can answer it. Yet X recognized Everest at every age, "no matter how much you grew," because "there's something else that defines you." The name was never the answer.

In The Giver, the community has a name for everything and a memory of nothing. One man, the Giver, holds the memories for all of them, and gives them away so that someone can see color again. I think that is what drama at BTA was. We never had the right name, but we had the Giver who gives us our meaning and our memory, and who lends us a little of His power to create. Art was that power, passed down to us in a small booth in the corner of an auditorium. And luckily, I get to paint the world we create directly, with colors, brightness, and transitions.

Here, I have the names. I have sixty LEDs, ten Slack channels, and a stage manager who tells me exactly when to press Go. What I am still looking for is the thing itself. But maybe it isn't gone. Maybe, like Giuditta's fish, it has been shining in the dark water the whole time: in the warm-up, during the strike, at the stage manager and crew party. I just didn't know what to call it. I never did.

ps. the script for the four plays for reference: