Let your story breathe
Tips, tricks, inspiration, and encouragement for storytellers of all stripes
Greetings from Pensacola—
This Saturday is the final performance of LAST OUT for the 2025 season. I’ve regaled you with anecdotes and pictures from the various tour stops throughout the year. We’ve played in a wide variety of venues.
This Pensacola venue may be the most challenging yet.
Check it out…
We are in the Sanders Beach-Corrine Jones Resource Center. It’s a community center right on the water with a stunning view.
But here’s the thing. This venue is not really a theatre. We are, in fact, the first ever play presented here! It’s basically a ballroom used for weddings and banquets and parties. A stunning view benefits such events. But during a play? A stunning view can distract. Thankfully, with the recent time change, it should be plenty dark outside when our play starts.
Even so, you may have noticed in the picture above that there are only THREE front lights hanging from the ceiling.
And no wing space.
And you can’t see this, but there’s only one handheld microphone.
And there’s a great dance floor, but no permanent seating. The team at the Center is setting up chairs for us, though I suppose we could’ve gone picnic style!
So yeah. Light cues? Eliminated. We get on or off.
Sound? Renting what we need from a local audio company.
Actors? Once again we’ll be adapting some staging and relying even more heavily on their emotional honesty to carry the story.
But you know what? It’s all ok. The actors will offer. The audience will receive. The talkback will heal. Because no matter the technical variables, the story will be told.
This is a truth that took me years to understand… stories are not static.
Early in my theatre career, I wanted precision. I wanted pristine duplication. I wanted… well, I wanted to control my stories. As I matured and evolved, and my storytelling deepened, I understood that it was far more important to let my stories breathe.
Because stories are living, ever-evolving things. They change with the audience. They change as the teller experiences more and more life. They shift, like water, filling variously shaped containers and trickling through newly discovered cracks.
If you seek to control your story, you will crush it. If you squeeze it tight, you will suffocate it. If you insist it stay the same telling to telling, you will extinguish it.
Let your stories breathe. They are precious things, but you can’t treat them preciously.
Because ultimately they are not for you. They are for your reader, your listener, your audience.
They’re gonna bend and twist and partake of your story however they want to, anyway.
See, if you tell your story to a hundred people, you’re not telling one story.
You’re telling a hundred.
The Page&Stage Podcast: THE FUNNY VOICE GUY
The next episode of the Page&Stage Podcast will land in your inboxes on Monday.
In this episode, I interview Jim Sorensen, exploring his diverse journey through theater, boxing, and a new career in financial services. Jim shares his experiences in acting, the challenges of portraying complex characters, and the importance of storytelling in both theater and life. He discusses his love for radio theater and his unique adaptation of A Christmas Carol. He also reflects on the lessons learned throughout his career, emphasizing the need for financial literacy among artists. The conversation highlights the interconnectedness of creativity and practicality in the arts.
You can listen on the Substack App, and all episodes are also available on Apple or Spotify.
And if you want to put faces with voices, the video version will be available over on YouTube.
Be sure to comment or hit me up with any questions/comments/complaints, thanks as always for reading, and have a great weekend—
Jason “Ballroom with a View” Cannon
I love this. It points out how words set the stage and the story “really” takes place in the imagination, individually and collectively.