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Editor’s Note: BookTrib is proud to present this personal essay by guest contributor Amy Neswald, debut author of I Know You Love Me, Too (New American Press), a collection of linked stories inspired in part by her experiences working as a wig master on Broadway. The book was recently awarded the New American Fiction Prize.

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When I heard talk of ghost lights remaining lit on the stages of empty theaters when Broadway shut its doors during the pandemic, I thought it signaled the momentary end of collective storytelling. The silence of theaters around the world seemed deafening, after all. I should have known better. Now that audiences and actors alike are getting back to business, I’m reminded of my formative training. Stories are egoless, invisible, humble, and they live on. It all happens behind the scenes. 

I worked on the Broadway production of Jersey Boys for three years before I ventured up to the fly rail of the August Wilson Theater. It was pre-show and automation, lights, props, sound and wardrobe were on the stage 30 feet below. It was my job to watch them through the slatted floor as they ran their cues and set their props and costumes. Kenny, the fly man, had a lawn chair and a reading lamp up on the rail. Weighted ropes looped around pulley systems and dropped down to the floor of the stage. I only had a few minutes up there, but I thought about what the show looked like from the bird’s eye view, and how for most of the audience this would be the first and only time they’d see the performance, a special night. If we did our jobs right, they’d never wonder at the mechanics of the show. If we did our jobs right, they’d be immersed in the story.

The theater basement was just below the stage. It was a grey, concrete expanse of space broken up by a loft and a lift, the sound desk, automation, the head electrician and carpenter’s offices, too. The musician’s pit was in the basement, a rarity for Broadway shows, but there it was. And then there was the wardrobe department, a slip of a room crammed with sewing machines and costumes in need of repair. Adjacent to them was the hair department, where I worked. My team and I were the wig masters, a silent and small niche of a job. We told ourselves that if the audience noticed the actor’s wigs, we’d failed. Two of the worst things that can happen to a wig person: 1. A wig falls off during a performance; 2. A reviewer mentions the wig in a review. As a department, we were lithe and sly, flexible, quick and invisible.

For years, this was my bread and butter job. Often, before the house was open, I walked across the stage and looked out into the empty audience to feel the energy building up beneath me. After the show, when the audience was gone and the ghost light lit for the theater ghosts so they could find their places on stage, it was the lingering energy dissolving into stillness that soothed me. 

The first day Jersey Boys moved into the August Wilson, the stage was at its emptiest. We had no idea if the show would be a flop, a hit, or something in between. There were reminders of the fates of the shows that had come before: an unsmoked cigarette and a scene list from Little Shop of Horrors, a closing night outfit from Little Women, an abandoned bouquet of flowers resting on a high shelf. But the first time the orchestra struck up the eleven o’clock number and the audience leapt to their feet, some of us danced in the wings, as moved and surprised and exuberant as the audience and the actors and musicians on stage. Over the next few years, we filled the space with our stories as we merged to tell a single story on stage. 

My August Wilson days were an exercise in meaning. For a while, I struggled with all of it, the repetition, the invisibility, the yearning to be seen. But since the night on the fly rail when I looked down on the stage, not empty, but not yet ready to present the story, I’ve come to understand how existence itself is a group effort, mostly unseen, and how those machinations behind the scenes play out on the stage we call our lives. Our roles are shockingly simple. We are a part of the story because we are storytellers. And we tell stories because we’re hard-wired to do so. Stories measure the passage of time. They seem like they’ll go on forever, but they always end — and the audience walks away with a new story of their own.

Genre: Memoir, Potpourri
Amy Neswald

AMY NESWALD is a fiction writer and screenwriter. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Normal School, Bat City Review, and Green Mountain Review, among others. She is a recent recipient of the New American Fiction Prize with her debut novel-in-stories I Know You Love Me, Too, released in December 2021. Prior to moving to rural Maine, she had a long career as a wig master for Broadway shows. She teaches creative writing at the University of Maine in Farmington and continues working on her next novel and a collection of short films. You can learn more at her website: www.amyneswald.com

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