Above all, the theater is mysterious. It is surrounded with an air of magic and, in a way, deception. To those who have only ever experienced it from the side of the curtains where the lights go dim upon the start of the show, it is strange, not only that anyone would dedicate time and effort to pretending to be someone else, however entertaining it may be to the audience, but also that somehow, these people have conjured up this story, convincingly or otherwise, through some arcane and obscure ritual that involves spending lots of time saying the same words over and over and constructing facades of buildings.

Yet, it is also mysterious to those on the other side. The process is much less mysterious, as they were the ones saying those words, building those facades, focusing the lights, setting the sound cues and an infinity of other tasks that only go noticed when performed incorrectly. It is still mysterious in its draw, however - as with any art, it is rarely a rational desire that drives a man or woman to create it.

I have been on both sides of the curtain, and I have felt that mystery. I have felt it in many theaters, even performed in many. There is one, however, that stands out, perhaps for my proximity to it on a daily basis, perhaps for the irony that it is nothing more than a high school auditorium. Make no mistake, it is nothing more than a high school auditorium, albeit a fairly new one built with a reasonably large budget. To most who pass through it, it is very little, even for those who come to see more than some presentation by administrators or vendors of graduation related paraphernalia. I feel, however, that I have been privileged enough to know it enough to see the elements that are always there but often unnoticed.

It is unusual to stand in an empty theater. It is usually encountered with the constant murmur of the living. The silence of a theater, of my theater, is an empty thing, a thirsty thing, full of a lust that cannot be sated by anything except applause and glory. An empty theater is oppressive, but also calm - it is the feeling of standing outside, feeling not warm, or cold, with no breeze, but looking up and seeing a tornado on the horizon. Silence, though common, is not the sound most worth remembering in my theater. The sounds of people are what it was built for, and with them, it gains life. More than any other sound, the one most notable is that which the silence thirsts for - the sound of applause, of appreciation, of glory, of success. It is not the polite clapping of parents and friends that follows, nearly infallibly, any performance of any caliber that it truly wants, but that of an amazed crowd of onlookers, amazed, incredulous. It is the applause in which the clappers lose themselves, a wall of homogenous joy that crashes against the performers, whatever their capacity, the applause that metaphorically brings the house down. I believe I have been lucky enough to drink of that nectar in my theater, at least a time or two.

What does my theater smell like? It is not an easy question, even if you have been there. In the empty, thirsty theater, it is the smell of sawdust. It is again a thirsty smell, portentous. It wants for company, for more sawing and building, for disruption, for the creation of more painted wood that by some mystery that is barely understood becomes at least a representation of a place. The filled theater loses that smell, it is too covered with the myriad scents of people. Backstage still carries its own distinctive scents, however - the sweet but chemical smell of hairspray, the cloying thickness of stage makeup, the sweat of actors returning from intense scenes. The strangest but most memorable combination of these I ever smelled in my theater was rain, mixed with gunsmoke from a prop gun being tested, mixed with the hairspray from the dressing room, all stirred together in a dissimilar but strangely intoxicating brew. The actor knows one more smell, that of the bows. It is not an entirely pleasant smell on its own, with thick stage makeup blended with guaranteed sweat, commonly tears, and occasionally blood, but by its association with the sound of that mighty applause, it is the most enchanting scent in the world.

The appearance of my theater is difficult again to name, as it is, by nature, a chameleon, shifting its face with the faces that stand upon it. There are brick walls, undoubtedly, beige and smooth, creating a corridor that runs down towards the window into the absurd and tragic. There is a wide swath of seats, unbroken by any central isle, bolted to the concrete floor. Around the seats is blue carpet, the front of the stage is wood, the grand drape, falling apart but still recognizably a faded purple, the main area of the stage that stealthy love of the theater, black. High above hangs the catwalk, the haunt of the spectral forms of crew members, who also inhabit the booth that lurks in the back of the theater, full of sound and light equipment, its interior messy and relaxed.

Somewhere in one of these places dwells Susie, the disembodied mannequin head who is kept facing the stage at all times, and playfully blamed when things go wrong; a physical embodiment of the superstition of the stage. However, my theater’s true appearance is not in its physical attributes, but in people and lights. The actors and actresses provide the reason for its being, and they change with the years, few places moreso than my theater, their garb different every time, their surroundings, again, different, and yet they are the true appearance of the theater - thus, it is a chameleon. The lights change too, with various colors and places they light, and yet some things never change. The house is almost always lost in a dark cavern, which, like the applause, unifies the audience into an essentially faceless mass, and absorbs them into the stage. From the stage side, the lights are brilliantly blinding, like dozens of miniature suns blaring down and leaving nothing in shadow. They are intimidating, to be sure, as any such exposure is, yet also exhilarating. As with the applause, the scent of the bows, they create that element of victory - staring out, fighting their beautifully harsh glare, into the applause, with the smells of the theater all around - there are few things in this world that I would rather have.

It is not particularly special, my theater. There are thousands like it. Yet they all share their core, they are all grown of the same stem. The sounds, the smells, the looks, differ slightly, but they are cut from the same cloth. Their mystery is pervasive, and infinitely incomprehensible, but through thousands of years of human history, nothing has been created that gives the same experience as knowing that a theater has cradled you while you strived to make something beautiful, and that you succeeded.