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nown then as Becky Meyer, she played an ensemble part but spent her time offstage studying the lead actors, puzzling over how they recited lines. “Why do they deliver it that way?” she wondered. “I think it’s awkward when that person walks on stage at that moment. I wish they came from a different entrance, and I wish they would come in on this line.” A director was born. Rebecca Meyer-Larson believes in the power of art. Since 1997 she has directed Moorhead High School’s fall musical, drawing international acclaim. Her students have also compiled prestigious honors. In the past five years, two Moorhead High seniors have been named Presidential Scholars in the Arts, a distinguished national honor. Alumni have gone on to Broadway and highly regarded universities. Students who leave theater after graduating lead better lives because of the school’s program. Moorhead High sometimes performs edgy shows, but this fall the school will stage a traditional story: “Peter Pan.” Students will spend every weekday and Saturdays perfecting the play. Many days will end after 10 p.m. The 100 or so students in the cast and crew will finish homework during breaks. The hard work is worth it. Not only are the shows prolific, but twice Moorhead High has taken its act to the renowned Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland. In August 2008 the school staged Disney’s “High School Musical” to the adoration of English and Scottish children. Brandon Heide was there. Four years earlier he had been an angry freshman stuck in Meyer-Larson’s beginning acting course because of a scheduling mishap. But the stage attracted him and he took at least one of her courses each year. In “High School Musical” he played a skater dude in front of an audience half a world away. “Being in the theater environment, the way she runs it, it opens up your heart,” Heide says. Heide is now pursuing a nursing degree in college, but Meyer-Larson, 41, doesn’t need students to teach her how theater can change lives. It was Meyer-Larson’s own experience that taught her that. In summer 1976, warm winds gusted off Big Cormorant Lake and greeted guests of the Cormorant Inn. A family with four daughters had recently moved there from Arlington, Va., after buying the Minnesota resort. The Meyers had no experience in the business, but the resort was lovely. Visitors stayed in one of eight cabins or a lodge suite. They took out boats or swam at the beach or in the pool near the restaurant and
bar. Though most didn’t, visitors could also use the game room where Becky Meyer was getting good at the Ladybug tabletop video game. In addition to the game room, Becky loved sitting on the beach or in the restaurant, where she sucked Jell-O blocks up a straw to hear a “whoop!” sound. She and her sisters cared for their often-cantankerous goats, Go and At. In the winter, when only the restaurant and bar stayed open, Becky occasionally took the stage to sing along with the bands that played for the supper club crowd. She still dreams about these days. But by fall, her life became more difficult. Becky and her sisters rode the school bus to nearby Audubon, a town 35 miles east of Fargo/Moorhead. As if her Virginian accent were not enough, Becky could not pronounce her R’s and attended speech therapy. Already an outsider, she felt ostracized by some because her parents owned a bar. And her fashion choices – styled after pop stars Madonna and Cyndi Lauper – only made her stand out more in the halls of the high school. Luckily, Audubon was small enough that Becky participated in everything: the volleyball team, the cheerleading squad and, in 1980, the seventh-grader landed her first role in a play, “Get Smart.” The theater proved to be a valuable outlet for her in coming years. In 1982, the nation faced an economic recession and the Meyers lost the resort. As her parents dealt with the results, Becky turned to the stage while she struggled with school and life. For a while she wondered if she was crazy. “Why do I have such a need, need, need to create?” she wondered. She never left the theater. In college she majored in the craft, along with speech and English. She went to Minnesota State University Moorhead, where she met people who shared her passion for art – in theater, music, literature and fashion. She discovered writers Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. In the summer after her freshman year, she became a Lutheran Bible camp counselor and found she liked kids. “I’d struggled enough when I was in middle school and high school, that I thought I could help other kids not struggle, I thought that was a calling of some sort,” Meyer-Larson says. By her sophomore year she was married and had given birth to a daughter. A gift. But the carefree college days were over. She juggled tests, papers, projects, work, a baby, a relationship, shop and tech hours for theater. She worked at Vic’s Lounge in Moorhead until 2 a.m. and then returned to the university’s computer lab to write papers on such plays as Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party.” The next day she did it all again.