May 12

Its lunch Monday and I'm getting ready for a meeting with the incoming President Renie Barger and a prospective board member for next year. (Our year starts July 1) We meet individually with each propsective board member to give them a full briefing on the financial and programming status of the theatre. We talk about board responsibilities and staff responsibilities and about some of the important issues facing the theatre. This will be our third meeting since last week with just a couple more to go before the May board meeting on the 28th when the nomination list is formally submitted to the board. Each prospective member is given the information and than asked to think it over and let Renie know if they are still interested. Then the board reviews all the potential new members and selects from that list.

We finished the first full weekend of Zink shows. April bought Jade and a friend tickets for the matinee performance of Zink on Sunday. After the show I talked with the girls and asked if when the character in the play dies it made them cry. They both looked at me like they didn't know what I was talking about. I suddenly realized why the show works differently for adults and kids. Every adult watches the scene when I carry Becky onstage and she is dying and we cradle her between us and they know what is happening. During the scene Papa Zeke (the wise old Zebra) crosses over from Africa to the Human world and reaches out and takes Becky's hand and she leaves her parents. The parents never break the cradle that Becky was in and continue to look at the spot where she was as if she is still there. Every adult knows what happened in that moment. But for the kids they see Becky leave her parents and go back with Papa Zeke to the imaginary Zebra world.

It was like a light bulb going off to me when the kids didn't know what I was talking about. In some ways the kids are able to understand that Becky went off to a different place. The adults in the audience understand that Becky has left her parents and they feel that loss. Both adults and kids come back together at the end of the play when Becky talks about the courage to face predators in both worlds.

The wonderful thing about doing theatre is that it can be a powerful tool on so many levels. The best plays are the ones that you keep learning from with each performance and each audience. Sometimes the audience doesn't catch all of the nuance that is being created and all the meaning in a play until they see it a couple of times. But the performers continue to grow and learn every time you step on that stage and into somebody elses' shoes to experience life from a different perspective.