Their Own Crew

It’s 2:00 a.m on Sunday morning, just five hours after the final number of the last show of “Nooses Off,” the fall play. The members of the crew stand on an empty stage embracing each other, tears in their eyes. They’ve just finished tearing down and stowing away the very set they’ve spent two months painstakingly building.

The red and gold wallpaper senior Layla Villanueva spent a week painting, the platform frameworks that took sophomores Gracie Schwabauer and Nick Edge a month to assemble, the variety of fake murder weapon props sophomore Megan Devolder personally picked out for every cast member, all gone in a matter of hours.  

Although their work may not have remained on the stage, the crew had built something else over the past two months that no one could tear down: a family.

“We get to know each other so well and the goods and the bads of our lives,” Davis said. “There isn’t a single person on crew that I wouldn’t trust with my life.”

This crew family came out of the two months of splinters, dark eye circles, and tears put into the sets they created as community. It’s built on the inside jokes whispered through headsets and late nights spent tediously arranging the set pieces perfectly in their positions on the stage. And this bond all begins in the auditorium, the place the crew calls “home”.

Their home is complete with narrow catwalks in the roof, the light storage room they call the “Bat Cave,” and an upstairs props loft filled to the brim with various fake animals, food and costumes. The auditorium is their sacred, free place for the members to work, talk or simply hang out, and it is where their familial bond grows. The main room of the house: the workshop.   

There are no couches or bean bags but in the eyes of Schwabauer the warm laughs and smiles of the crew make the space feel less like a workshop and more like their own living room.

It is in this room that the crew kids meet when they don’t have a job to do. It is the location of many dance parties and singing sessions, and the home of the tools used to build the sets.

They gather in the corner of the room, cracking jokes and bringing up random topics of conversation. Everything from the highs and lows of their day, breakups or new possible relationships, grades, doomsday conspiracy theories, or the latest DeFeo meme someone sent on the group chat is brought up.

“We trust each other with more than just things related to crew, we tell each everything about our lives,” Schwabauer said. “The crew is our safe place.”

According to Schwabauer, the crew family bond isn’t limited to the walls of the auditorium. After long work days crew members will often go on adventures outside the school to get donuts or go on late night shopping expeditions. Car rides complete with showtune jam fests ensue on the way to grab dinner at places like Noodles and Company or Chik-fil-a.  

“Whenever crew is around each other we can’t help but smile because we are all together,” sophomore props manager Megan Devolder said.

The crew community means more to the members than just an after school activity. For many, like senior Zoey Davis, technical theater isn’t just an extracurricular to add to a college application–it’s a future, a support system. If she had never stepped foot in the auditorium and decided to not go to a work day when she was a freshmen, Davis believes her life would look very different.

She would go home at 2:40 pm instead of 5:00 every night, she wouldn’t be majoring in technical theater in college and she wouldn’t have the same friends.  

Like Davis, Devolder says that without theater crew she would not have found her career passion in scenic design. Nor would she have found a creative and emotional outlet through her props and fellow crew members.  

When she’s sad or stressed about her grades or friend drama Devolder finds comfort in her props loft. She sifts through the dozens of fake animals, food, or crazy clothing and plays with the random stuff she finds. When she’s sporting cat glasses and a sombrero hat or chasing her friends across the loft welding plastic lobsters as weapons, it’s hard to focus on the bad things.  

The family is there for each other in the best times and the worst, both the highs and the lows. So when Davis’ dad had a stroke earlier this year, it was the crew that first reached out and comforted her, especially technical theater teacher Tom DeFeo.

After hearing the news from Davis’ mom that her dad was in the hospital DeFeo pulled her aside before the musical review and sat her down to talk.

“It’s going to be OK,” DeFeo said. “Last I heard he was doing alright…If you need anything please don’t hesitate to ask.”

These reassuring words and check-ins continued throughout the musical review show that night, comforting Davis. She knew she had a support system to count on in her crew family, no matter what life threw her way.  

According to Schwabauer, it doesn’t matter if you are in lights, sound, set or paint crew, everyone is contributing to the same goal: to create a perfect show. Each crew depends on the other.   

They aren’t the ones standing in the spotlight, or bowing on stage receiving standing ovations from the audience. Their success is hidden from the public’s eye, but their community’s hard work and bond throughout each show is enough fulfillment.

In their eyes, they’re a family through and through, and will continue to be even after all of their set pieces are taken away and the stage is left empty.