Nine hours into the tech rehearsal for Our Town, the black box theater is overrun with chairs. There are chairs for the actors sitting onstage. Chairs for the actors sitting offstage. Chairs to mark where the audience will sit. Chairs for the director, stage manager, Technical Director, and hair and makeup crew. Chairs which have become tables. Chairs which have become tool benches. Chairs which have become clothing racks.

And an eclectic array of chairs they are.

There is a bench upholstered in flagrant orange, procured for Antigone two years ago. A folding director’s chair from Who Am I This Time? the same year. An iron-trimmed kitchen chair, originating in A Grimm Tale three years ago (but worming its way into the set of several shows since). A pair of crates built for Wilde Tales, six or seven years past, which have found all manner of function within the theater.

Other chairs were variously donated or pilfered over the years from other sections of the school. A matching set of four wooden chairs which graced Mr. Gilbert’s office, way back when the school fit on a single campus. An assortment of chairs and stools from the student lounge. Two ordinary audience seating chairs from the spring play, left behind when all the others were returned to their day job of seating the Upper School choir in another part of campus (sorry, Mrs. Turner). An ornately carved chair that used to sit in the central atrium of Mays, back when it was the place where House Heads would congregate at the end of the day, waiting for the final straggling students to leave so they could lock up and go home. And, of course, the five or six industrial-grade folding chairs which have mysteriously manifested themselves in the space over time, and which no one remembers bringing in.

Each of these chairs is the opposite of what you might call an anonymous object. By "anonymous," I mean a thing that could be easily replaced by a functionally equivalent alternative without its loss being noticed or felt. There are very few places with no anonymous objects—possibly your grandparents’ house. Probably the New Heaven and the New Earth. And, in an ideal world, the theater. Theaters are inherently story-steeped places; words, actions, and intentions of past productions cling to every prop and platform. There should be no anonymous objects in the theater.

Even more so, there should be no anonymous people in the theater. We go to the theater to experience rich stories, to grapple with deep, human questions, to laugh, to cry, to see the souls of actors laid bare and, in that vision, to trace the contours of our own selves. We may also go to cheer on a student, classmate, friend, or child. All of these reasons are wonderful.

But in the context of a theater in a school, or another small community, we are given an additional gift on top of (and above) the rest. In such a theater, the actors are not anonymous. You have taught the actor playing Hamlet in three different math classes. You have seen Ophelia, year by year, Field Day by Field Day, fight her way upwards in the Kajaba Can Can rankings. You carpooled with Polonius through all of kindergarten and first grade.

And yet, in all of that life, you have never seen them stand in the specific shoes which they now fill. The heartbroken girl you see giving flowers to the Danish court is not a different person than the ferocious one on the Kajaba field. The character is different (if either you or the actor ever forgets that she is not, in fact, Ophelia, everyone is in trouble). But there is likewise a profound loss that comes from separating them too distinctly: If there is no personal interaction between actor and character, the performance falls flat. It demeans the humanity of them both.

Konstantin Stanislavsky liked to use the term ‘the magic if’ to describe this fruitful tension at the heart of the craft. Acting begins by saying “I am I, but if I was [Ophelia]…” You are fully yourself, and through that groundedness in the reality of who you are, you are able to be the stand-in for another person. In a theater without anonymity, the audience is invited into the exercise as well. In richly knowing each actor, you are able say “you are you, but if you were [Ophelia]…”

And just as you suddenly notice the craftsmanship, geometry, and accumulated marks of time on a chair when you are press-ganging it into being a costume rack, the gift of watching someone you know embody a new character is an opportunity to view her with fresh eyes. To reconsider her. To hold in one hand everything you have seen and known about her, and in the other the possibility that she has grown, that some things you knew about her have faded into the background and others have become more intensely true than ever before. To clear away the accumulated assumptions and more fully and clearly see the image of Christ that she bears.

So give yourself this gift: Go to small theaters. See little shows. Challenge yourself to reconsider the members of your community. Help them step into another person’s shoes by taking a seat yourself in one of their beloved chairs.