The Dal Theatre Society’s (DTS) production of Romeo and Juliet is an eight person show consisting mainly of lower-year acting students with a bewildering tendency to drop the word “chud” in everyday conversation. We are three months into rehearsals and I’m having a blast. I have a very small role (Peter) and am onstage for approximately ten minutes. Most rehearsals are spent standing around, listening to stumbling Shakespearean English and valiantly trying not to fall asleep on my feet. It’s the perfect role.

What with barely being in the play and all, I have found myself with a lot of time on my hands. So I have become preoccupied by a range of theatre-related ponderings — specifically, curiosities about the general public’s seeming disdain for the very prospect of engaging in it. 

I hesitate to say that theatre is fun. Writing is fun. Theatre, on a good day, is bearable torture. Often, a show will end and I am left wondering why the hell I would willingly put myself through that shit, only to turn around and realize that nobody is forcing me. I could just stop. But, inevitably I find myself turning right back around to do it all again, not entirely certain why. 

Me and Siya Ajay  — the director of Romeo and Juliet, a second-year Dal student whose directorial style involves a lot of yelling at the cast to shut up before wondering aloud if we could “maybe try acting better” — are the only ones in the rehearsal room, waiting for the rest of the cast to show up. We chat about art and what drives people to practice it and I ask her why she thinks people see theatre as cringe. It seems universally known that theatre is not cool. Depending on who you ask, Shakespeare is slightly less cringe than musical theatre, while improv is the worst sin of all (especially when preceded by the word queer, or Dal).

Siya does not need to think hard about her answer. “People think putting yourself out there in any capacity is cringe.” 

The cast shows up. We start rehearsal. I zone out in the corner of the stage, as I am wont to do so long as Siya continues to add me unbidden to lurk silently in scenes I am not technically a part of. I think about whether I agree with her sentiment. I think I do. People are scared to care. Or at least, they are scared to be seen caring. Same thing. We’ve heard it all before — I’m not writing a think piece on Gen Z’s full-fledged commitment to our thin veneer of nonchalance, or the disastrous implications cringe culture has had on us all as a generation. But still, I can’t help but wonder. Surely being boring is worse than being cringe, right? 

I’m not usually concerned with theatre kid hate, because none of them care and the vast majority are a little annoying — but I also tend to take issue with judging a person’s identity based solely on how their interests line up with your own. Believe it or not, being annoying is a pretty common trait of simply daring to be a human being, and not a mark of a person’s moral character. Theatre kids are at least generally aware of their own annoyingness, which is something I can not say for a lot of people. 

I think this conversation about theatre’s purported cringiness, in the end, is missing one crucial element. People don’t think theatre is cringe. Not really. They think it’s queer. And of course it is. Theatre, entirely and unequivocally, is extremely queer. 

It’s queer in a way that is unapologetic and undeniable. It’s more than just gays loving show tunes. When you are on stage, you are playing a character, performing an identity, understanding the audience as witness to the unveiling of yourself-as-something-else. Your own performance is revealing something hidden and inherent about the world around you. Take the character off the stage and the whole thing unravels and becomes absurd. Have you ever seen stage makeup in broad daylight, outside of the glare of a spotlight? It’s almost obscene. 

So is that it? Theatre is cringe because it’s queer, and everyone else is just a homophobic loser? I don’t know. It’s an interesting conversation, or at the very least, I think it is. But maybe I have an ulterior motive. Maybe I think you should all be more cringe. Maybe I think you should examine your perceptions, do something hard and put yourself out there. Or maybe I just think you should come watch our show.