An Iron Age Experience – From the Mind of a Maroon
by John Jerbasi (Wentz in Maroons)
Sports can create an instant bond between people. Whether it is the sharing of the field alongside teammates in glory or in losing, trusting a teammate to complete a play or the physicality and c
ontact shared on a field, sports creates a unique connection. Theater, also, creates very special relationships with people. I, personally, have my most special and dearest friends from having worked with them in theater. For different reasons than sports, I feel, in theater, one must strip down their insecurities and completely trust the person next to them on stage, with more than a physical play or action but with themselves, with who they are. Now, hybridizing the two, as in “Maroons”, has created something truly memorable.
Our first rehearsal of Maroons consisted more of a football practice than a rehearsal, well, at least for the first hour or so. We started by tackling a “dummy” and lining up and running a few football plays. On another rehearsal we practiced outside. We ran football drills: hitting a football blocking sled, running football plays: running, kicking, and passing, and drew up actual football plays. Not only did this help us, as actors, to acquire the physicality of playing football to help us leverage that onto the stage, it also effectively built a team rapport.
Before every rehearsal / show we pass around the ball to one another as a warm up. This passing of the ball has become ritual. Feeling the football in your hands and throwing it across the stage has served more than a warm up but also as a union between us, a bond. Even though the separation is there, the ball acts as the connection, the act of starting an action and the other completing this action. This may be the importance of the nostalgia of playing catch with your dad at such a young age.
Backstage, most certainly, has a locker room feel before and after the show and in-between acts, much like before and after games and at a half time. On stage and off, I feel a strong solidarity with this group of guys. It is most effectively the combination of incorporating a sport and theater into one unique experience.
Every Thanksgiving morning I play a football with the same bunch of guys that we dub “The Turkey Bowl”. This tradition has been going on for the past several years. Most that play in this game I have not known from outside this game. Some I still don’t know there first name. We all show up, split teams and we play a game or two. There have been heightened words at times and frustration with one another at moments when playing. But the important thing is we all end the game thankful no one got injured and wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. It is one of my favorite traditions, and yet, I find this peculiar as I don’t know some of these guys outside of this one game and I see most of them only at this one day of the year.
I feel this same camaraderie with the guys while working at Iron Age but rather on a much more meaningful level. We have transformed ourselves into football players and teammates on stage. But, more significantly, we have become teammates and friends off stage, which holds even more truth while on stage, for the action is already complete. Through the physicality and the contact we have created a unique bond with one another and through “Maroons” we have shared a true piece of who we are. Like what is aspired in acting, in football or any sport when under physical duress your mind shuts out the unnecessary thinking and you allow your body to react.
