The Value of Theatre: Tom Nance

"Theatre, as in all art, should bring about an immediate life defining response and then if truly successful the response will linger and change a part of the participants' beings.

This theatre experience is analogous to the sport experience where what is remembered is the unusual and heroic. For example baseball fans remember the 1988 World Series where Kirk Gibson with two bad legs and a stomach virus come to bat in the bottom of the ninth with the Dodger trailing 4-3 with two outs and one man on first. With the count 3-2, Gibson slammed the ball over the right field fence and then hobbled around the bases to score the winning run. What the baseball fans remember are the courage and the triumph when everything told them that failure had the better chance.

As a community theatre actor, I have seen courage so many times back stage: the actor rushing onto the stage without missing a cue even though shards of glass still sparkled in his hair from the car accident which totaled his truck just a few hours before performance, or the young man just recently out of the emergency hospital after being bitten by a brown recluse spider. The young, pale skinned man would deliver his lines and then go off stage to vomit into a plastic lined trash can. Only once did the young actor miss a cue because he was sick, and that time two other actors filled in his lines flawlessly with one of the three specials illuminating an empty part of the stage as the only indicator for the audience that anything was amiss. Nor will I ever forget, the actress who performed the very night her mother died. The actress felt that once again her mother was watching her performance.

Now, these types of heroics are common place in the theater and other endeavors as well, but many within the non-theater community know nothing of these achievements. But the plays themselves in live theatre bring these same heroics for the actors, technicians, and audience to share: Henry Drummond standing up for his adversary Matthew Brady's right to defend his beliefs, Tevye confronting the crumbling traditions in his people's life while heroically clinging to his faith in God and his family, or Ma Joad fighting to keep her family alive when all the men in her life have been either killed, run off, or emasculated by a compassionless society.

Of course the theatre has more to offer than just heroics. Theatre can be mindless entertainment, tearing eyed nostalgia, or mind humbling satire. It's because of theatre's diversity that it does have so much to offer the community. Technology will change the operation of society but does little to change humanity. Art does that. As Paul Gauguin said, "Art is either plagiarism of revolution." Theatre at is best is revolution in that change only happens when the unexpected occurs. Live theatre is filled with the unexpected.  It is life itself."
~Tom Nance, local actor