If you never say your name out loud to anyone, they can never ever call you by it

As my longtime readers know, I’m involved in my school’s drama club. What some of my readers might not know is that my drama club is currently putting on a production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and I’m playing the character of Sue Bayliss.

I’ve always loved playing eccentric characters; the ghost possessed psychic in The Uninvited, the schizophrenic in Check, Please, and the bumbling yet lovable dwarf Doc in Snow White. I’ve been a cat, a flying reindeer, a three little pig, a mouse, a chain-rattling ghost, a munchkin, a boy (twice), a cockney pauper, a maniac cannibal, a little girl, a lackey, a Holocaust victim, a British doctor, a mother, and many others.

In theater, I gain the superpower of transformation. I have the ability to become another person entirely different than my own.
Who doesn’t wish they could take a break from themselves?

I exist in a different universe, a world spawned from the imaginings of a single person, The Playwright. This person becomes God, they become the puppeteer of my world and I am at the mercy of their scripted will. Unlike my character, I know the path and the inevitable future of the play, but I am helpless to control the story. I can only become a channel of emotions and feelings, a can only resurrect a dead character on paper and give it life on stage.

I shed the familiar skin of Juliette and I am given a new face plastered in make-up. I am given different hair and clothes, a persona alien to my own. I suddenly have a different mindset, a different philosophy on life, a living, breathing person with different memories than myself and different aspirations and dreams. And when it’s over, I come back into myself, reborn with a new appreciation of the unscripted world we live in.

Maybe it’s the lonely attention-seeker in me, but I love being recognized. I love being acknowledged when I’m on stage, I love being stared at, I love stepping out from the shadows and standing center stage where I can be seen and heard. Perhaps this sounds egotistical, but it’s the truth. We all secretly wish to be seen and noticed. We all need to be needed. For even without the smallest character, the play would be altered. In theater, everyone matters onstage; we all feel wanted. Sometimes I feel like that feeling is missing in real life.

Here are the pictures from the production:
(photos taken by Kailey)

The set:


The cast (we were told to be in character for the picture):


My onstage husband, Nick:




My 1940's costume and hair do: