This venue was more appropriate; the Manship Theatre was too... opulent for the proceedings, with its multiple balconies, freshly painted walls, unscratched glass, and polished stainless steel bannisters. The Little Theatre, in comparison, is much more fitting for a Louisiana School performance: painted stucco walls that are uniformly light-starving black, save for the wide, white swatches of scratches that reveal the material beneath; hastily and haphazardly constructed barriers to hide the machinery under the stage; timeless in that way that only 1980s artifacts can be. The last, and only previous, time that I had been there was when Gabe Franks and Drew Cothern acted in the Theatre's production of "Shakespeare in Hollywood," a fantasy farce about the attempted production of a film version of "Midsummer Night's Dream" under the strictures of the Hayes Code. The atmosphere, of course, was different this evening.
Doctor Pat Wildham began the evening with the usual discourse: a listing of the other schools which belong to the national consortium of public high schools focused upon enhancing the skills of the academically gifted, and the eternal observation that, within that group, only LSMSA placed significance on an artistic curriculum. He then introduced the evening's master of ceremonies with an obnoxiously long list of achievements that he had received, which can be effectively summed up as "Tulane student." The person in question, a 2008 graduate named [redacted], is a Houma native who will soon graduate from Tulane's undergraduate program, specializing in urban something, and has travelled and performed all of the humanitarian activities in which the rich frequently take part to demonstrate their magnanimity. Wildham's speech was the sort of listing that, after my graduation made me feel like a failure: I found myself at LSU, despite spending my entire life attempting to gain the footing to seek academia elsewhere, a dream that ultimately proved to be utterly unfeasible. The simple fact of life is that, no matter how hard you work or how much gumption you demonstrate, there is a hard ceiling that determines how far one can progress in life; without the networking aspects of life that come from a politically connected parent or a financially omnipotent background, one can only rise so high. As I was born into a trailer in the middle of a dirt pit, there was always going to be a limit for me; even if my dreams exceeded that limit, there was no chance that I would ever be able to obtain the accolades and achievements that were already set aside for the children of opportunists and carpetbaggers, who were born into the modern equivalent of landed gentry. In the intervening eight years, I have come to begrudgingly accept these limitations, and embrace those things which I have accomplished, and respect myself more for clawing my way out of an unenlightened country hollow into the academic world at all, without the benefit of nepotism, favoritism, or beauty.
The first performance followed a fantastically edited video of LSMSA life in a nutshell, entering through the main school building's front doors and touring the areas of residential life, all set to the kind of gratuitous and awful pop-punk that was so popular when I was a student, and, it would seem, at least through 2009, when the video was produced. It had all the hallmarks of a recital choreographed by Randy Allen, although those tropes are difficult to define. The entire troupe begins on-stage; entire troupe moves in a singular body; dancers leave stage in groups of three, stage left first, then right, then left, with accompanying upper body movements from those who remain that make it appear that they have been literally cast into the darkness of the wings; the occasional ostensible break from routine by a single dancer that makes one question whether it was intentional. The dancers themselves, however, were fantastic, and, I dare say, while some of my contemporaries may have been better individual dancers, on the whole this was the best uniform troupe that I have had the pleasure of watching perform.
What followed was a saxophone performance by a distinction candidate, who played a piece that was composed by Dr. Benner. The composition itself left something to be desired: there were great stretches of it that consisted--intentionally, I hope--of sections from "Amazing Grace," and it was a bit varied musically for a single composition, changing tempo one too many times, in my opinion. The staccato sections, however were quite likable and pleasant. There was a moment in which I wasn't sure if the performer had made a mistake, sections in which there were no notes being played with the distinct sound of air moving through the instrument as his right hand played with the holes in the bottom area frantically. This particular peculiarity, however recurred twice more in the performance, meaning that it must have been intentional. Afterwards, he was joined onstage by two other students with different saxophones, and they played a piece that was beautiful and harmonious.
The three vocalists who performed were, frankly, fantastic. MaKayla (ugh) Mackin may have had the most physical presence, and Alexander Adams may have had the strongest voice, but my money is on Isabel Milton for the future. Her pitch was perfect, and her tonality was beautiful, not to mention that her intangible audience-performer link was strong, and her dress was the most lovely. The only issue was that she failed to project as well as her compatriates; there were moments in which I was hardly able to find her voice under the volume of Dr. Charles Jones on the piano, and I doubt that the audience members occupying seats behind me were able to hear her at all. Alexander Adams followed her, and I must admit that I was thoroughly unimpressed by his first piece, an English folk ballad about a fickle lover named Phillis. His face was contorted into that false, unnerving smile of the musical theatre actor, and his small, feminine, effete movements were too reminiscent of the mincing, prancing Uncle Nelly stereotype under which we all labor, and which we should seek to overthrow. His second song, however, "Anthem," from the musical Chess, was powerful and very impressive, possibly the best technical performance of the evening. Even my cold, dead heart was moved. Mackin was the final vocalist of the night, and she, too, was quite impressive. As mentioned, her presence was strongest, a pale girl with a strong voice, and the two songs she performed, including the old jazz standard "The Lady is a Tramp," were, as best as I could tell, perfectly suited for the talents that I inferred from her performance.
It was in the theatre category that I was least impressed, it pains me to say, although I remember being similarly disappointed by the acting on display at the first gala. The scene that was chosen was one from Neil Simon's The Good Doctor, a Chekhov-inspired comedy. During the portion of the evening in which the arts faculty in attendance were saluted, I took note that the acting director was unknown to me; I am disappointed that Kate Riley, Myrna Schexneider's successor, lasted such a short time. Considering that Myrna was both legend and legacy, a fixture at the school from its inception in the 1980s until her retirement in 2007, after more than two decades of servitude. I had high hopes that Riley would become a fixture herself, but it would seem that fortune felt otherwise. Whoever this new instructor is, his vision of theatre is quite different from Myrna's, which is not in and of itself a fault, but I could not help but think that Myrna, Simon fan that she was, would never have allowed a performance with such a low-brow, slapstick feel to besmirch the stage beneath the proscenium arch that had, for so long, been hers. I was forced to remind myself that the acting on display was that of students, but I was at war within myself throughout the entire evening for this very reason. I had not imagined that the teachers would have grown so old; I had not expected Randy Allen's hair to have grayed so, nor Dr. Jones's respectable girth to have grown, nor the battle between Dr. Benner's scalp and the amassed army of his hair to have favored the bald so much. In my memory, they are frozen in time and space, eternally stopped at the age they were when I was a student. Time has ravaged them as it has ravaged me.
It was my impulse to infantilize the performers. They were all so young, so full of hope, that I as at odds with myself to remember that I, too, was effervescent and optimistic, but that did not mean that I had been "innocent." Although the echoes of my teenage rebellion have been subsumed by the voices of intervening classes, just as the atonal, ethereal music of my giftie forebears was lost in the ebb and flow of time. The marks we made upon the firmament, assuming their permanence, have been washed away into the ether, recounted only between fellow Natchitoches expatriates, as we recall the glorious days of our ascendant mischief and maturing intellects. We imagined ourselves as rare and precious giants, when in fact we were nothing more than children--brilliant children, but children nonetheless. And so it is that I find myself willing to forgive the histrionic acting on display, the lapses in characterization and blocking; they are students, and cannot be expected to be perfect thespians. The scene in question revolved around two characters, a bank manager afflicted with gout and a hysterical woman whose illogical demands for unearned compensation increasingly grate upon the banker's gout-irritated nerves, while a third actor makes two minor, bookending appearances as the banker's secretary. Distractingly, the gout-afflicted character's actor's indecision in using the crutch with which he moved about the stage was manifest, and at no time was his pain believable; Myrna, in her infinite, method acting wisdom, would have stuffed the boy's shoe with newspaper to give him a believable limp (and, if she had been putting on a period piece, she would have shaved my damned head before allowing me to go onstage with anachronistic highlights), but alas, we live in more sympathetic times. The material in itself may have been funny, but the first few minutes provided nothing but stony silence from the audience, as jokes fell utterly flat or went over the heads of the assembled families. I was unmoved by the performance, but recalling the gravity with which Myrna had always treated the flow of energy between actor and spectator, I forced myself to be the first to laugh aloud. Myrna always used to say that she knew when I was in attendance at a performance because of my unexpectedly booming and delightful laugh, and I made sure that the actors knew that at least one person appreciated what they were doing. With the silence broken, more peals of laughter began to ring out around me, culminating in loud guffaws and chuckles at the thematically appropriate times. I could do that much. The performance, overall, was not terrible, but was ultimately immature, and lacked the gravitas and grace that I would expect from such a venerable institution. Then again, these students were sophomores, so there is a great leeway to be expected, and granted. I am sure that, in time, they will become better, and I would never want them to be discouraged by reading the self-oriented criticism of a bitter alum such as I am.
There were, of course, several other dance performances, all of them quite graceful and fluid, and playing to the implied strengths of the individual dancers. I was also very pleased by the ethnic diversity of the troupe; during my tenure at LSMSA, there were never more than half a dozen male African-American students at any given time; two remained among my "seniors," two in my class (one of whom failed to return for senior year), and three among my "juniors." Which is not to say that LSMSA lacked diversity overall, as I attended with a great number of Korean, Japanese, Hispanic, Chinese, Arabic, and Indian students, but that particular demographic was severely underrepresented in Prudhomme. Among the female students, the disparity was less vast, but the girls largely refrained from dance; this is no longer the case, and I am quite impressed. The evening ended with a piano performance by the aforementioned graduating-with-distinction senior, which was an extremely impressive rendition of a very difficult piece of music. Alicia and I collected our thoughts and departed the theatre, taking note of the art pieces in the gallery before we made our discrete exit, grown weary of having our noses pressed against the glass which separated us--the disaffected adults we have become in the face of a world that denigrates intelligence and idealism--from the hopeful youth that we once were, when Natchitoches was home, and the future was open wide.
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