As Open Book Players will not be presenting another production until late winter or early spring (hopefully at our home base of Johnson Hall in Gardiner which is still undergoing restorations and reparations), we will present “guest” essays from previous and present Open Book Players performers regarding their experience with the theatrical format of Readers Theatre.
Our first contributor is Avery Mickalide…
Avery Mickalide grew up in Litchfield, ME. He finished a PhD in physics in 2019 and now works for a genetics startup. He lives in Oakland, CA where he is raising children with his dear fiance. In college, Avery’s life took a turn for the mystical. He is attempting to make sense of what all is happening by constructing a deck of power cards based on the wild and varied insights delivered unto him.
I am in the middle school auditorium and the room is abuzz with excitement for we are about to put on a spectacular production that we have been rehearsing for weeks. Good, sturdy sets have been built and every scene has been carefully blocked. There’s one problem though: I don’t have a single line memorized. I desperately pore over the script before the show, willing the words to stick, but each one slips from my mind as soon as I read it. Realizing it is hopeless, I approach my favorite teacher and the director of this play, Mrs. Rioux, and admit my failure to her.
It’s been more than a decade since I have been in a play, two decades since middle school, but to this day I still have variations of this dream. One cannot overstate the psychological burden that a theatre kid must overcome to learn those lines: to flip through a script after marking each line with a highlighter, the pages now a sea of yellow, and wonder “How in the world will I ever memorize all of this?”
Enter Readers Theatre. You get to have all the fun of performing plays, embodying all sorts of characters, and enjoying camaraderie with other actors, and, best of all, you get to take that script right up there on stage with you! You don’t have to memorize complicated blocking either: To go off-stage, you swivel 180 degrees clockwise on your stool to face away, and, to return to stage, you swivel clockwise again. For costumes, you wear all black, including a handsome Open Book Players long-sleeve t-shirt, and use different hats to indicate different characters.
My first official Readers’ Theatre performance was a production of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. When I was older, I got to play Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” alongside my best friends for several years running. There was this one character that my friend would play with a rough cockney accent, and the way he would say the line “Do you, Mrs. Dilber?” will be forever burned into my brain.
I had a lot of fun doing Readers’ Theatre. There was one production that we took and sort of toured around Maine a little bit. We got a comped meal after each show which made me feel like a paid actor. I think the highlight of it all was when the camera crew from PBS came to our school to film us for the “Zoom into action!” segment of the television show “Zoom”. They recorded us doing a performance and then interviewed us afterward. There’s a VHS tape of the episode kicking around somewhere in Maine.
Having not been in or seen a Readers’ Theatre performance since childhood, I would very much like to revisit it now that I am an adult with a more honed aesthetic sense. I am poised to appreciate it for the unique art form it is with its own merits. Is it a stripped down version of a regular play or a suped up version of being read a story? Does the presence of the script increase or decrease the intimacy between the players and the audience? Is the script more like a character or a prop?
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