___Our business is in an old department store building that has been renovated to suit our needs as a children’s theatre; the shoe storage room has become our prop closet, the finance office has become our makeup room and the dressing rooms have become, well, really busy dressing rooms.
___What’s interesting about working in a renovated building is that everyone seems to remember the original design a little differently. Some people wax nostalgic about how there used to be an escalator in the middle of our lobby, while others reminisce about the cafe that stood where the concession stand is now. One patron even told me that the restrooms in the back of the building used to be for African Americans and that seeing the whites-only bathrooms replaced by our box office brought tears of joy to her eyes.
___There was never an escalator or a cafe, and there were never any segregated bathrooms, but you can’t argue with people about their own memories. There could never have been an escalator in the front of the building, because the front half is only one story. Also, I have no idea how or why we would have removed a whole escalator system. It would have been really convenient if there had been a cafe by the concession stand, because then there would probably have been a cafe counter and some plumbing, which would make things a lot easier. But there wasn’t a cafe, and there isn’t plumbing, and it isn’t easy.
___I tried to explain that the blueprints of the building indicated that there was only one set of bathrooms downstairs, and that they were intended for staff, but the crying lady just shook her head and told me that I was too young to know the truth. Really, our new box office used to be a set of fitting rooms, not restrooms. This was a small store, and they weren’t outfitted with fancy powder rooms or lounge areas. The restrooms were never segregated, and they also weren’t public.
___Still, people see what they want to see and remember things the way they want to remember them. One of the few things that everyone does seem to agree on is the row of lighted window displays in the front of the building, facing the street. Where Belk’s used to display the new season’s collection, we advertise our new shows with three-dimensional renderings of our posters. Some patrons say that they used to have in-store pageants and the winners got to be “living mannequins,” posing and modeling clothes in the windows for hours at a time. Then there was some scandal about teenagers posing in flesh-baring bathing suits who were forced to put on cover-ups to preserve modesty, even though the temperature in the windows during the summertime was well into the nineties. In my mind I see young women dressed in Barbie’s vintage black and white strapless bathing suit, coyly wrapped in sheer white robes. I don’t know if this is true, but it certainly seems plausible.
___While our window displays don’t feature live children in costume (yet), they are pretty amazing. We have some truly spectacular volunteers that dedicate dozens of hours each week to creating these large displays that can be seen all the way across the parking lot. They’re big, they’re colorful, and best of all, they’re cheap advertising.
___Of course, every silver lining has a cloud. Whenever we do a popular show like High School Musical or Beauty and the Beast, we get a ton of phone calls asking for the movie times, and a few people who want their money back because “that kid didn’t look like Zac Efron at all.” Once, we were doing a comedy called Lucky Dollar Private Eye, and we had someone walk in and ask to hire a private detective. Seriously. You can read the whole story here.
___Last spring, we did Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (which you can also read about here and here, if you are so inclined), with an evocative display that caused quite an uproar. The poster artwork for our production was, in my opinion, brilliant. The background was burnt parchment paper, while the focus was a silhouette of a large hand with puppet strings extending from each finger and each string ending in a hangman’s noose with a body. It was very creepy, very cool and very likely to attract the 15-year-olds who were being forced to see The Crucible for extra English credit. I loved how the image captured the two primary punishments of the Salem Witch Trials (burning and hanging), and alluded to the political motivations of the play (manipulation and censorship). In short, I was in love with this design.
___Within thirty minutes of completing and installing this particular window display, our front office received an angry phone call from someone in the neighborhood wanting to know why the theatre hated black people.
Go ahead and read that last sentence one more time.
___We assured her that we didn’t hate black people, or any people, for that matter. Our irate caller demanded to know why our artwork depicted the lynching of five African Americans. She then threatened to call the news and protest outside the theatre if the display wasn’t removed immediately. Our office manager tried very hard to explain that they were not black people, they were blacked-out images of the victims of the Salem Witch Trials, and that if she looked closely, she would notice that the strings and the hand were also pitch black. No, the woman insisted, we were all hateful bigots who were going to rot, first in jail and then in hell.
___Though we knew the point was moot, we tried to reason with her. We explained that the bodies were silhouettes and that all silhouettes are black. We explained that our display of Peter Pan also showed silhouettes of children flying to Neverland, but that it did not insinuate that black children were capable of flight. No matter our attempts at reasoning with her, the woman on the phone just became more and more belligerent.
___After many rounds, it was decided that the window display had to be removed. Just like the woman who remembered seeing the segregated bathrooms that never existed, this woman could not see past the color of the paint to view the image as a whole. She couldn’t see the truth; she could see only prejudice.
___I hated that we were backing down because of the protestations of such a small-minded person, but I understood that her perception of the image was skewed. I hated that I understood the dozens of stupid diplomatic reasons why we had to change our display. Most of all, I hated that we had already spent hundreds of dollars printing full-color posters and fliers that couldn’t be altered or exchanged.
___Several hours after the phone call, when my classes and rehearsals had ended, I turned off the inside lights to the theatre, locked the doors and got in my car to go home. As I backed out of my parking space, I saw The Crucible’s new and improved window design, which was, alarmingly, the same as it had been that afternoon, with just one small change.
The silhouetted image had been whitewashed. Because it’s perfectly fine to hang white people, I guess.
___Seeing the colorful art in our windows continues to be one of my favorite parts of coming to work in the morning. The locals drive by our theatre just to see the displays and to stay in the know about our upcoming shows. Even if our patrons can’t agree on the fabled escalator or the location of the old jewelry counter, they all love to see the store windows filled with this season’s new arrivals, just like the old days. And if there’s ever a problem with the design, be it a young girl’s silhouette in a bathing suit or the silhouette of a hangman’s noose, it can always be covered up with something sheer and white.
UPDATE: After posting this, I decided that it needed some visual aid. Here is a photo of the original design for The Crucible window.
And here is a photo of the “acceptable” display. Sorry about the blurriness and the glare. As you can see, it’s quite watered-down, and not nearly as cool as the original. It also has a paper sign at the top that reads “The Story of the Salem Witch Trials,” just in case people were still nervous.
Here are some other silhouette displays that, surprisingly, did not outrage the neighborhood. Exhibit A: Flying Black Children.
Exhibit B: Gay Pride Dancers.
And my personal favorite, Exhibit C: Creamsicle People.
Update Complete. Thanks for reading!
Only Small Actors 