My Nonprofit Reviews

It’s been both a tremendous honor and a great pleasure of mine to be able to learn and grow as a person and an actor with the Traveling Players these past four years of my life. Though often I have the opportunity to reflect on the near addictive environment of fun that so thoroughly permeates every pore of the TPE experience, I don’t often pause to soak in just how much the many summer camps and school year classes have actually given to me as tools to use in my life not merely as a Shakespearean actor, but also as a student and a young adult facing the looming prospect of life on my own. TPE has been one of those rare places for me, a sort of holy zone, that is set aside from my daily trials and tribulations and I can focus on developing my passion for theatre around people that quickly have become the best of my friends.

Though I’m not the stereotypical “theatrical introvert” who finds by default the strongest connections to others who share my love for the stage, many of the kids I’ve met through Traveling Players are my closest friends and confidants, even removed from the context of the camp itself. These bonds are not merely products of networking among the people of similar ages in the theatre community, like the friendships I’ve been able to get out of other theatre companies, but are friendships formed through the shared experience of the aspects of TPE that are unique to it; working with our hands, camping, hiking, observing, listening, sharing, and being members of a very pronounced and incredibly supportive community.

These elements are so unlike anything else we get to experience as teenagers that the friends we make out of it are so much deeper and connected than any others we make at our age. It is hard for me to put into words, this intangible quality that TPE possesses that gives each and every one of its members such an overwhelming feeling of safety and love whenever we are there. So strong in fact, that even as a seventeen year old high school junior, I have middle school friends to whom I’ve confided things that I’ve haven’t disclosed to a soul in the entirety of my own school.

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