What Theater Means to Me: Laura Smith and Baron Pugh

WHAT THEATER MEANS TO ME

By Baron Pugh By Laura Smith

I remember the first theatrical performance I ever saw. I was about 10 or 12, living in Virginia, and my middle school took us to see Little Shop of Horrors. And I remember sitting in that dark auditorium with the giant Audrey II puppet and all the actors bursting into song… I absolutely hated it; I didn’t understand it; I didn’t WANT to understand it. So of course, I would never step foot into a theater again, right? Well, since you are reading this in a theater company’s magazine, I’m sure you know the answer to that question. What I would come to learn is that theater is an experience, and one that you must be willing to fully give yourself into in order to enjoy. At such a young age, it was difficult for me to appreciate that experience, but as I got older, my appreciation for, and understanding of theater grew. I break the theatrical experience down into two elements: the audience and their reactions, and the play itself.

The audience you are with will impact how you take in a perfor-

mance. Of course, you tend to have the person who unwraps candy right behind you, or the person who didn’t turn off their phone, or even the person who keeps getting up to go to the bathroom. Those will generally color your experience and enjoyment in a negative way. But the ones that are exciting to me and worthwhile, are the moments where the entire audience gasps at the same time, applaud at the same time, and my personal favorite, when someone is so moved or impacted by a moment that they can’t help but to vocally respond. I know many may find that last one a distraction, but how is that any different from other collective responses you may have? For me, it says that that person is so connected with what is happening on stage, that they NEED to say something, like people who respond to the TV when their team’s quarterback gets sacked or when the wide receiver misses a perfectly good pass.

The play itself, whether a drama, period piece, comedy, or musical,

is just a story at its core. But the term ‘story’ can often lead people to think of it as fictional and irrelevant to their life experiences. Stories are much more than that, though. In the early ages of theater, plays explained history, tradition, creation. They were stories that revealed to the audience important life lessons. Today’s plays do the same. I often say that a play is a reflection of what is going on either in your life or the world around you. And though a play may have been written during an earlier time period, don’t assume that the life lessons will be dated. Instead, a story written in a different era takes on new and different meaning in the present. Take for example, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). Through Willy Loman, the play addresses identity and the inability to accept change, and how that impacts a person and their relationships. 1940’s America is quite different from today, and though Miller’s story hasn’t changed, today’s audiences bring with them current events of a world pandemic, social injustice, and other global and economic impacts that change how we perceive the play and its characters. To explain what theater means to me, I felt it important to mention the above as it explains my simply written answer. To me, theater means, and is all about, life experiences. Theater allows us that peek under the rug, to look in the mirror and face the good and the bad within ourselves and within society. It allows us to evaluate the choices we make in life and better the world we live in. By the way, Little Shop of Horrors grew to be one of my all-time favorite shows.

I was asked to write about what theater means or, more specifically, “what theater means to me.” As I sit and reflect on my career, I realize it has meant so many different things depending on my age and what was going on in my life at the time. At first, it was an escape; a place where I could leave the world behind and not have to be a certain way. I started getting serious about theater in college when I was struggling with my sexual identity. I grew up in the South, which was not an awesome place to realize you are gay. I loved how I could lose myself inside a theater. Once my professional career started, it became a job. As a young stage manager, I was constantly looking for the next gig in the next town in order to make money. During that time, my life, what there was of it, fit nicely in a large rolling duffel bag. It is truly amazing how much you can get into one bag! I could totally have a side business packing other people’s suitcases or car trunks before they leave on vacation. When I found my way to Trinity Repertory Company in 1996, theater became a career. A crazy, stress-filled, fabulous career of producing playafter-play-after-play all at one theater. A career in which you produced really good, not so great, and sometimes really bad theater mixed in with a couple of “I will never forget working on that” life-altering pieces of theater. A career that afforded me all those adult things. Health insurance. A car. A house. These things may seem basic, but trust me, these are things most people in the arts never have and that must change, and yes, that is for a whole other article. The most important thing that theater became for me was an outlet for empathy. The theater gives me a place to release it, to explore it, to grow from it, to empower it, and if we get it right, to gift it. You truly want to make the world a better place. How incredible might it be if experiencing theater, seeing plays written by August Wilson, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Larissa FastHorse, William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., Paula Vogel, Susan Lori-Parks were mandatory for school kids. How wonderful would it be to allow children to watch a play for two hours and see life from the eyes of someone who doesn’t look like them or speak like them. A play about a different kind of life, a different kind of culture, a different side of history, thus allowing them to open their eyes and to learn to be more accepting and empathetic towards others. What kind of world would it be if everyone could answer the question, “What has theater meant to you?”

—Laura Smith has been at Trinity Rep since 1996 and currently serves as the director of production.