I happily report I returned to Roanoke Island last week to work for The Lost Colony, America’s premier outdoor drama. I have worked for the big show under the stars off and on (mostly off) for 38 years. Being here feels like wearing my favorite pair of old blue jeans.
This was not always so.
In 1983 I signed a contract to be one of two dozen actor/technicians. Like young people everywhere I was bursting with that particularly sophomoric combination of energy and ignorance that made me a danger to myself and others.
I thought I was a genius, but for some inscrutable reason no one else did; instead, the Master Carpenter who ran the crew said I was the worst A/T he had ever seen and cursed me in the vilest terms I had ever heard in my young life. After the season ended, I swore I would never do the show again. Four years later, though, I needed a gig — so I went back and had a great summer, rewarding enough to make me return again in 1990. I had grown up a lot by then.
I returned 1997 and ‘98 as the Master Carpenter. I was 34 years old when I signed that contract, with an established reputation in New York and a technical resume as long as your arm. I ran the A/T crew that summer, but I never thought it could teach me anything new.
How wrong I was.
Early in the season one of my A/Ts screwed up, injured another A/T, and knocked him out of the show. The next evening before he went to the dressing room I called him out and demanded he tell me what had happened. I craved the satisfaction of hearing from his own lips why he had screwed up so badly. Broken scenery I could fix; broken bones I could not. But as he launched into an obviously well-rehearsed explanation for his appalling lack of judgement I realized I was not listening to him. I was marveling at him.
He was tall and strong, with well-proportioned features and big hands. I studied the soft fuzz of the beard on his face, probably the first one he had ever grown, possibly the only one he ever would grow. I saw, as for the first time, his taut, sun-burned skin, and when he glanced at me between sentences I saw how clear his dark brown eyes were. He was so young.
A warm, wet wave washed over me, and I realized I was seeing myself 15 years earlier. True, my eyes were blue and my hair was blonde, but I was peering back in time as if I were looking through a magician’s mirror or some gypsy’s crystal ball. In a flash I saw the entire arc of his life: his wedding and his children and his balding head flecked with wisps of gray. Even now, on the advent of his adulthood, his black hair was already thinning.
He was still blathering when it dawned on me there would be no bawling out. I could not be mad at him anymore than I could be mad at myself for who I was all those years ago, so told him to not do it again and dismissed him as quickly and as quietly as I could before retreating into the carpentry shop to be alone with the smell of sawdust. I was still struggling to make sense of what I had experienced when I remembered the last time I had prayed.
“Lord, please don’t let me screw this up!” is what I had said aloud to the empty room when I had signed that contract. My prayer had been answered in the physical sense: the show was up and running. But my prayer also had been answered on a deeper, more subconscious plane: I had not crushed this young person with verbal abuse as I had been flattened all those years ago.
The show closed and Hurricane Bonnie blew me back to NYC. Within weeks I began my first of many seasons building props and scenery for Saturday Night Live. The SNL scene shop was in the rough-and-tumble Brooklyn Navy Yard, and when I broke up a fight between two carpenters during my first week I impressed the old-school shop foreman. He brought me back for every show despite the fact that I did not have the union card I would eventually earn. I had broken up worse fights between my A/Ts that summer, but I did not tell him that.
I wonder what this season will teach me.
Dwayne Walls Jr. has previously written a story about his late father’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease and a first-person recollection of 9/11 for the newspaper. Walls is the author of the book “Backstage at the Lost Colony.” He and his wife Elizabeth live in Pittsboro.