Theatre Company Woes

I've never really quite understood why the world of celebrities always seemed to be filled with assorted scandals until recently. I was a drama student ever since I entered high school. Even before that, I always enjoyed giving oral presentations and being on stage for a few moments in an assembly or a small scale play. I love acting, it gives me a chance to be someone else for a period of time on stage. The first time I was in a large scale school play, I felt like I was the one tht held the audience's attention, in the spotlight, they only had eyes for me. It was a feeling of triumph, ecstasy, and power like no other. Afterwards, people came up to me and told me I did a good job and that it felt cool to see someone they knew on stage. I auditioned for the Theatre Company at my school, the drama class that produces the large production plays and is made up of the best actors in the entire school. I got in and for most of the year, it was a good experience. I had the chance to meet people from different grades and had the opportunnity to not only act in many quality productions but also opportunnities to work with industry professionals. However, in the past couple of days, I discovered the uglier side of being in a room full of actors.
Now I'm going to admit to you right now that actors for the most part are egotistical people and I'm including myself in this comparison, even though I'm speaking in a third-person perspective. In a sense, I suppose its understandable. Actors are the ones with the ability to remain composed despite of nerves, they're the ones with the loudest voices, and the ones with the best lying and deceiving skills. However, its getting to the point where its getting absolutely out of hand and I can't stand it anymore. This is the situation: every year, we put on at least one huge production. This year however, we are in a bit of trouble. There were problems with budgeting for the original script chosen, so we couldn't do that. Our drama teacher, and right now I'm going to say this for anybody out there who has not been to a single drama class/workshop: I have never met a normal drama teacher before; they all seem to be eccentric in some way. Anyhow, the drama teacher brings in this woman with ideas that are....rather more appropriate for the sixties. Lets just say, we're not into the whole hippie stuff anymore. So the entire group confronted the teacher, we didn't like where this was going. After much argument, it was decided that we would come up with something on our own. We decided to do a Shakespeare production, I have no disagreements with that. After all, Shakespeare is considered to be one of the greatest playwrights of all time, it'll be pretty interesting to work on that. But, there's a select group of people that I have not had a problem with until this point in time. All they want to do is to be "funny". Now I put that in quotations because humour can be divided into two categories. There's the good kind and the crap kind. The good kind would be like the movie "Forrest Gump", where humour is written in a way that makes you laugh from the heart; with clever dialogue and an intelligent but comedic story. The crap humour would be like "Date Movie". Its humour that gives you a quick laugh, but you leave the movie theatre/playhouse with nothing. For some reason, a particular group of people feel the need to make the play "funny". Well, that's alright, different strokes for different folks, right? You like the play funny, I want something with more substance. Its the way they're acting that pisses me off. They wanted to completely change Shakespeare. This isn't the part that's annoying yet. I didn't like the idea much though. Having all the characters in the tragedies fake their death and then pair Hamlet up with Juliet, Ophelia with Nick Bottom in donkey form(wtf?!), etc. Okay, in a way its sort of like fanfiction, I can deal with that. I did however strongly disagree with quite a few of the changes they made and sort of became the voice of half of the Theatre Company that agreed with me. The leader of the other side seemed hell-bent on having me as the co-script writer for some reason despite my open opposition against his ideas. But he was probably hoping that if I would be bribed with the opportunnity to write the script for the school play and stop telling him that his ideas are crap. Then we had this huge discussion with half of the class that cared, me, him, and the teacher. The disagreement was more between me and him and the teacher was more on my side. So finally, she decides that we should just find a new script thats already written up that we can all agree on using instead of wasting our time arguing about a script that hasn't even been written yet. So we look for scripts and hey automatically trash every script we come up with without even looking at the script. In fact, they trash talked everyone that didn't agree with their ideas. They automatically assumed that if it wasn't a comedy written by them, it was crap. In fact, this is what one of them said: "The play can be sad, but it has to be funny." Is it just me or does that make no sense at all?
This is where the uglier side of actors comes in. We can all lie and conceal our hatred and emotions so well that you seem to not know who is truly your friend. The person who says they support you in front of you will turn and tell somebody else that they think you're not worthy enough for Theatre Company. I'm sick of constantly having to choose between expressing my opinion and not being hated by the actors, at least the select few that seem to have a problem with people who disagree with them. In fact, as surprising as it may sound, alot of the actors are followers, not leaders, as you can see with the quote earlier. I'm embarassed to be associated with people like that.

I'm quitting.