Rural, Ridiculous and Ready for the Spotlight!
Making Something From Nothing
There is something slightly irrational about making theater.
It requires writers, actors, musicians, technicians, designers and an audience to agree to gather in one place, at one time, to create something that exists fully for only a few hours. It requires collaboration, trust, vulnerability—and a willingness to fail rather publicly.
Maybe that’s also what makes it matter.
For Connor Simon, theater has always been part of life.
“I grew up in the theatre,” he says. “I love the intricacy of every little thing. I love the stress and the anticipation. I love the required teamwork and the group victory after a successful show.”
He even values what happens when it doesn’t work: the lessons that come through failure, criticism and trying again.
For Lisa Glover, the journey has been very different. Sixty to Curtain, an original musical created by WeMore Theatre Troupe for this year’s Scranton Fringe Festival, is her first experience actually being “in theatre.”
She has always admired the art form, particularly musicals, for their ability to help people consider different ways of being in the world. But performing herself was another matter.
“Singing, acting, dancing—these felt mortifyingly off-limits to me since middle school,” she says.
Now she’s doing all three.
That willingness to step into unfamiliar territory has become central to the creation of Sixty to Curtain.
The project began through Scranton Fringe Festival’s Fringe Theater Lab, which offered NEPA artists $1,200 and support to create an original work together. Simon, Glover, Jacqlyn Hyde, Noah Parry, Andrew Nelson and Quinlin Burke had worked on various creative projects before, but never together in this way.
They started with a loose concept. Simon wrote the script, Hyde the music and Glover the lyrics, but ownership quickly became collective.
They created characters, experimented, rewrote, disagreed, solved problems and kept following what interested them—particularly what made them laugh.
And somewhere along the way, the project became about more than putting on a show.
“The biggest challenge through this entire project—and also the biggest gift—has been managing communication and personal relationships,” Simon says. “If you ever want to test your ability to keep a group together or form consensus, put on a play with your friends.”
That may be one of theater’s quiet superpowers.
Creating something collectively requires people to listen, compromise, trust each other and occasionally surrender their own brilliant idea for somebody else’s better one.
Glover has discovered something else: the freedom of not knowing exactly where creativity will lead.
She remembers her Lehigh University art professor, Berrisford Boothe, saying that once he knew precisely what a work would look like when finished, it stopped being art and became a product.
“This is the first time I’ve felt entirely immersed in the process and didn’t know where it would go,” she says, “and felt not just comfortable, but exuberantly joyful in that.”
Perhaps that’s the real story behind Sixty to Curtain.
Six people decided to make something that didn’t exist before.
Then a larger community began helping them make it exist.
That’s theater.
And, come to think of it, that’s creativity.
Sixty to Curtain premieres October 8 and 9 at 7 p.m. at Shopland Hall in the Scranton Cultural Center as part of the Scranton Fringe Festival. Tickets are $15 and are available online at https://scrantonfringe.org/events/sixty-to-curtain/
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