Opening night of the annual WVTC One Acts Festival, May 11, was a success. As the curtains closed, actors filed backstage to remove mics and costume pieces before greeting family and friends outside. Typical tech chaos ensued: costume crew reorganizing clothing items, set crew moving pieces offstage, and props crew returning items to their tables on either side of the stage. Lights were shut off, doors were closed, and everyone made their way home on a post-show high that carried over into the following day.

The following day, at the start of lunch, my friends and I waited patiently, as we had every other day, for theater teacher Robert Townsend to open the doors to the theater. He let us in and I proceeded to the stage, a list of things that needed to be fixed for that night in hand. I stopped in the doorway. 

Two of the picture frames that had been hanging on the set were missing from the wall. One of them lay in a broken heap on the floor; the other was nowhere to be seen. Assuming they had fallen, I carried the broken frame back to the black box, attempting unsuccessfully to reattach the wooden sides. 

By the time I returned, a small crowd of actors and technicians had formed around the props table. As I got closer, someone stepped to the side and I saw gray paint splattered over the monitor we had been using in the show. Not just the monitor, but the wall behind it and the props sitting next to it on the table. 

We all stood in shock as the realization hit that someone had gotten in here and vandalized the place. 

The initial shock quickly faded into dread. We hurried back onstage to assess the damage.

“It was sort of a slow discovery as we moved through the building,” Townsend said. “People gradually started noticing that there’s paint over all this stuff. Just a slow roll of like, oh my gosh, stuff has happened.”

As soon as we set foot back on the stage, I noticed an open paint can planted upside down on the platform, light gray paint pooled at the bottom and undoubtedly still mostly full. The props table on stage right was equally as gray. Each and every prop had been dipped in a healthy amount of gray paint and meticulously replaced. A gold cup sat upside down in a ring of dried paint, sealed to the table. A backpack, desk, even baby pictures. Everything was spattered gray.

“It was saddening, not because of the loss of the stuff, but because of how it impacted all the students,” Townsend said. “Seeing all the damage that had occurred to the things they had worked so hard to cultivate for the show and how that impacted that experience-that was the hardest thing to watch.”

That sense of despair waned into determination as people began to clean up the mess that had been left behind. The show would go on that night no matter what.

I grabbed a sheet of wood from the shop and held it as someone slid the upside down paint can off the platform. Gold dishes were spray painted and what wet paint remained was wiped away. 

“It’s that reminder that things are things and our community is strong,” Townsend said. “This was just a blip on the path. We are, as always, going to be totally okay.”