After the Curtain Calls

We’re all waiting for the curtain call. The actors onstage, the audience, and the whispering crew form a collective clench, with the strain of focus and persistence that has enabled the human species to act its way out of treetops and caves. We are only really human under pressure. And we only know animal ecstasy at that pressure’s release.

In high school, I performed in the play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour by Tom Stoppard. I played the commandant of a Soviet mental hospital that was illegally holding political prisoners. I wore a false nose, I said my lines, I hit my marks. And I couldn’t help but be moved by the lead actor, a thin-boned, sparrow-eyed senior whose whole body rattled with language and sentiment. I was waiting for the curtain call; he was alive onstage.

My work, Curtain Calls, is part of a trilogy about amateur artists. For the past several years, I have visited community theaters in Texas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, and Maine—from performances held in town halls to semiprofessional regional theaters. At the end of every show, I took my place in the back of the theater, trying to assume a neutral space, and filmed the curtain call.

The United States devotes relatively little funding to the arts—about .02 percent of our GDP, as opposed to Germany’s .36 percent—and yet all over the country people are still sawing and painting and lighting and memorizing and blocking and singing and dancing their way toward curtain call after curtain call. I don’t mean this as an up-by-their-bootstraps rant, but rather a paean to how necessary art is to any community. The true American dream is turning up the amp alongside your basement band and dressing up as the Cat in the Hat for Seussical. There is dedication, grit, and certainty in these performers that we’re having trouble finding in our churches and schools, not to mention our government officials.

In my travels, I met Perry Martin, the founder and former artistic director of the Bayou Playhouse in Lockport, Louisiana. Martin got his start in theater working for Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny. (Blanc loved to play a game during lunch with Martin, who is legally blind: he would slowly pull the table back every time Martin picked up his glass, until finally it would crash to the floor.) After a long career in drama, Martin returned to the bayou after Hurricane Katrina, salvaged seats from the Saenger Theater in New Orleans, and opened a playhouse in tiny Lockport. “There’s not even a movie theater in this parish,” Martin told me. Almost none of the visitors to his 98-seat theater, he said, have ever seen a play before.

In 2014, I went to the Bayou Playhouse to see a staging of A Charlie Brown Christmas. I was dreading it; I’d sat through some extremely tedious productions of Les Misérables and Jesus Christ Superstar during my travels, and my expectations were low. But the show was surprising and brilliant. Martin had inserted references to the recent Ebola outbreak and other contemporary issues, and the cast—all amateurs—was vivid and delirious. The audience was in hysterics from the opening curtain.

We were far from the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project, in which the US government paid community theaters to put on shows all across the country—but we were close in spirit. A March of Time newsreel from 1936 describes the Federal Theatre Project in typical, pinched, transatlantic voiceover:

“Within the few glittering blocks of Broadway’s theatrical district has centered in recent years all that mattered in the American theater. But today, from one end of the land to another, something is astir in the nation’s playhouses, for the US government is bringing the living stage back to hundreds of communities where no flesh-and-blood actor has appeared for a full generation.”

I, too, am far from any WPA-type blessing, driving across the country without a Guggenheim or MacArthur grant, spending my free time and vacation hours searching for American theater artists who make things outside the gravitational pull of Broadway’s glitter. I once sarcastically joked to my students—all graduating photography majors—that the government was reviving the WPA and they would all get jobs going out and documenting the American scene. It may have been the cruelest joke I’ve ever made. Most artists are out there on their own, like amateur scientists in a backyard NASA, building their own rockets, burning their own fuel, saving themselves on splashdown. The American dream isn’t to get rich like Donald Trump, but to stand under bright lights while your friends and neighbors applaud.

Photographer, poet, and musician Tim Davis was born to American parents in Malawi in 1969. He received his B.A. from Bard College, where he now teaches, and his M.F.A. from Yale University. His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, and The Walker Art Center, among many others. He lives in Tivoli, New York and is represented by Van Doren Waxter, New York.