Between the Wings: Field Notes on Community Theater, Ritual, and Returning
It had been twenty years. Long enough for my body to forget its cues. Long enough to convince myself that whatever version of me once stood under hot lights belonged to someone younger, braver, and probably less aware of her lower back pain and fear of stage ladders (okay, “stairs”). And yet, the moment I stepped into rehearsal at the Camille Playhouse, at Dean Porter Park in Brownsville, TX, it didn’t feel like starting over. It felt like stepping into a conversation that had been happening without me, yet still had room for my voice. I believe I don’t only speak for myself here, but for anyone willing to enter the ritual that is community theater.
Because that’s what community theater is, whether we name it that or not. It is a ritual. It is folklore. It is a living system of shared behaviors, beliefs, inside jokes, superstitions, and quiet understandings passed down not through books, but through bodies. Through repetition. Through doing. You don’t study it so much as absorb it, often without realizing that’s what’s happening. And Camille…well, Camille holds that in its bones.
A Theater That Carries Its Own Story
Founded in 1964, Camille Playhouse is one of the oldest continuously operating community theaters in Texas, and you can feel that the second you walk in. Not in a grand or snooty “look at us, we are historic” kind of way, but in smaller, more human details. The way people greet each other like they’ve known each other across lifetimes, even if it’s only been a handful of productions. The way someone always knows where the extra safety pins are, as if that knowledge has been carefully preserved and passed down. The way stories get told in fragments: “Oh, during that show…” “Back when we did…” “You should’ve seen…” It’s oral tradition, dressed in stage blacks.
No one hands you a manual on how to belong. You learn by watching. By listening. By being gently corrected when you talk backstage during a scene (don’t, just don’t). By noticing which dressing room mirror people gravitate toward, as if some carry better luck than others. Slowly, almost without noticing, you begin to understand that this is not just a place where plays happen. It’s a place where memory accumulates and builds, where each production leaves something behind that the next one inevitably picks up.
The Rituals We Don’t Talk About (But Always Do)
Community theater runs on ritual the same way folklore runs on repetition. Not because anyone formally established it, but because it’s the only way it works. There are the obvious ones:
· tech week, which feels less like a schedule and more like a collective freak out (theater peeps know what I’m talking about);
· opening night nerves that hover somewhere between anxiety and ceremony;
· the quiet pre-show circle where hands link together, and someone says something that is half-joke, half-prayer.
But the subtler rituals are the ones that stay with you:
· The unspoken agreement that no one says “good luck.”
· Blasting your favorite “pump up” music before the show (for us, it was Bad Bunny).
· The quiet respect for certain backstage corners that feel, for reasons no one can fully articulate, charged.
· The way costumes begin as fabric and gradually take on identity, until putting one on feels less like dressing up and more like stepping into a different skin, one molded perfectly for your soul.
And then there’s the transformation in the wings. That moment where someone is still themselves, still adjusting a sleeve or running a line under their breath, and then they shapeshift. Not dramatically, not all at once, but enough that you can feel the transition: Matthew becomes Cheche, Karen becomes Marela, and that sweet tea in a jar becomes rum. Anthropologically, this is called liminality, that in-between space where you are no longer who you were but not fully who you are becoming. It’s a concept that comes up often in studies of ritual, but we don’t talk about it nearly enough in everyday life, even though we move through it all the time. Liminality is the space of transition, where identity loosens its grip just enough for transformation to occur. It’s uncomfortable, a little disorienting, and often invisible unless you know how to look for it.
Psychologically, it’s a kind of suspension. The rules that usually define you (your habits, your roles, your sense of self) don’t fully apply, but they haven’t disappeared either. You’re still you, but not entirely. There’s a slight distance, just enough to observe yourself in motion (a sort of out-of-body experience). That’s where change happens, not in the fixed version of who you are, but in the space where you’re allowed to be fluid.
Theater creates that space on purpose. It asks you to step into it repeatedly, to occupy that threshold where you are both yourself and not yourself at the same time. You carry your own instincts, your own voice, your own physicality, but you layer something else over it: a character, a set of circumstances, a different way of moving through the world. And for a period of time, that becomes real. Not pretend in the dismissive sense, but real in the way your body responds, in the way your emotions follow the logic of the scene.
I think about those moments in the wings, right before someone steps onstage. They’re still themselves (adjusting a costume, running a line), but you can see the shift begin. Their posture changes slightly. Their focus narrows. Their breathing adjusts. And then they cross that invisible line, and they’re no longer just who they were a moment ago. They’ve entered that in-between space, and the audience meets them there.It’s a threshold state, and theater thrives in it. The stage becomes a place where identity is suspended just long enough for something else to take shape, and where returning to yourself afterward feels both familiar and slightly altered…as if some small part of that in-between space follows you back.
Returning
Coming back to the stage after twenty years, I expected to feel like an outsider. Instead, it felt familiar in a way that caught me off guard. Not easy, because, let’s be honest, there is nothing easy about remembering lines while also remembering how to breathe correctly, while also remembering that your body is visible from every angle, but familiar in the way certain rhythms instinctually settle back into your core. The first time I hit a moment on stage where everything aligned (the timing, the energy, the other actors, the audience), it didn’t feel like discovery so much as recognition. It made me realize something I hadn’t quite articulated before: theater doesn’t ever leave you. It just waits, a little smug about it, mid-breath, like you never fully stepped away…knowing you’ll find your way back eventually.
The Valley Is Brimming (And We’re Not Talking About It Enough)
I moved here from Houston about a year ago, after what can only be described as a fairly nomadic life. I’ve lived in big cities. I’ve seen BIG theater. Houston, especially, knows how to do it right, with the funding, the attention, the scale - Broadway tours, off-Broadway productions, polished performances down to the smallest detail. And yes, they are impressive. But what has impressed me more is what’s happening right here, in the Valley.
Because in the Rio Grande Valley, the talent isn’t imported (like it is in big cities). It’s built. It’s people showing up after full days of work and life and still choosing to create something extraordinary. Karen works in HR by day and then turns around and delivers choreography like it’s second nature. Bobby, a high school theater teacher, brings characters to life with the sharpest side comments and expressions that you’ll miss entirely if you’re not paying attention. Sigrid, a Nurse Practitioner, who seems to know everyone and everything, and pours so much truth into her roles that you forget they aren’t real.
Michael, a teenager who could easily be anywhere else, chooses instead to spend his time building a character so grounded that even without lines, his presence feels essential. Matthew works in tech and somehow brings a depth of emotional intelligence to character development that feels almost unfair. Nathanael, another tech dude (and I say that with affection) who also teaches jujitsu, stepped into a lead role and grew into it in a way that was genuinely incredible to watch. Gilbert, who is a whole professional in his own right and has worked on film and television sets, moves through the stage with a kind of ease that reminds you just how much experience lives in this room.
And then there’s Brandon Binder, Artistic Director of Camille Playhouse, who creates a space where actors are trusted to build their characters rather than being tightly controlled into them. It’s a rare kind of direction that invites ownership, and it changes the work entirely. And Michael De Anda, our technical director, who designed a set that deserves its own recognition, the kind of work that doesn’t just support the story but becomes part of its breath.
This is what’s happening here, quietly and consistently. And I don’t buy for a second that this is secondary theater. The Valley understands story because it comes from story. From oral traditions, from border narratives, from histories that are layered, complicated, contested, carried, and retold. Storytelling here isn’t a pastime; it’s a way of making sense of the world. Theater doesn’t just exist in that environment; it grows naturally out of it. So, of course, it thrives here. I genuinely believe that Brownsville is a major arts hub in the making, not in a flashy, overnight way, but in a slower, steadier, almost inevitable way. There is magic in the Valley, and its center of gravity, its Polaris, sits squarely on the stage at Camille Playhouse.
The Folklore of It All
If folklore is what people do together, what they repeat, what they believe, what they carry forward, then community theater is folklore in motion. It lives in the stories passed from one cast to the next, in traditions no one formally records, but everyone follows, in the shared language that only makes sense once you’ve been inside it long enough to understand it. Each production becomes part of a larger narrative archive, not written down but remembered, referenced, and reimagined.
Every actor becomes part of that transmission, whether they realize it or not. We are not just performing stories. We are participating in one. The story of us.That’s why theater feels so grounding in a world where so much else feels filtered or uncertain. The theater remains one of the few places where you can sit in a room and experience something undeniably real. Humans playing humans (or animals, or mythological creatures, or even trees), in real time, without edits, without algorithms, without the quiet suspicion that what you’re seeing has been shaped by a robot There’s no buffering, no second take, no curated version of events, no ChatGPT. Just presence, shared and immediate, and REAL.
Curtain Call
There’s a moment at the end of a show, during curtain call, where the applause hits you all at once, not just as sound but as something physical. It’s fleeting, it always is, but what lingers isn’t the applause. It’s everything that got you there: the rituals, the people, the quiet moments backstage, the shared glances when something goes right (or wrong), and you adjust together without needing to say a word. That’s the real thing. That’s the folklore. And after twenty years away, I’m reminded of this: the stage doesn’t just hold stories. It makes them. And if you’re lucky, it lets you step back into one.
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