Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

Though common narratives about my hometown of Montgomery, Alabama don’t include facts like this, the city once had a busy, if not thriving set of live theater offerings. Even before the Alabama Shakespeare Festival relocated to Montgomery from Anniston in 1985, the Montgomery Little Theater had been around for a long time. (Unfortunately, the Little Theater closed in 1994.) The city has also had two dinner theaters: The Lamplighter, which operated from the 1960s into the early 1980s, and another at Faulkner University that opened in 1987 and closed in 2018. Alabama State University and Auburn University Montgomery (AUM) have longstanding theater programs, as well. And there was also Huntingdon College’s Dungeon Theatre.

“The Dungeon,” as it was called, was a black box theatre in the basement of Massey Hall. Founded in Tuskegee as Women’s College of Alabama in 1854, Huntingdon College was moved to Montgomery in 1909, and Massey Hall was one of the current campus’s early buildings. Massey’s basement originally housed a gymnasium, and the space was used for physical education and sports until the adjacent Delchamps Center – now called Roland Arena – was built in 1958. After that shift in use, an English and drama professor at the now-coed college named Colonel Robert Barmettler began using the basement for a theater class. The Dungeon Theatre came into being in 1973, when performances started being held there after a significant renovation.

My experiences in The Dungeon came in the middle of its time frame, in 1992 and 1993— nineteen years after the 1973 renovation and fifteen years before building was torn down in 2008. Barmettler had retired by the time I came along, and Fiona then-Stewart now-McLeod was the theater director. I knew Fiona from my days in community theatre, as well as from the Carver Creative and Performing Arts Center (CCPAC) where she had done the one-woman show Shirley Valentine as a guest artist. That year, we started with a new play called Providence Convent, and followed it with Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, then The Apple Tree.

My time in The Dungeon followed four or five years of community theatre experience that began, for me, in the eighth grade. Following my older brother into a new passion that came to him just as he was graduating from high school, I piggybacked my way into small roles on stage and backstage. While working on the crew for a production of Mame at the Montgomery Little Theater in the summer of 1989, I was spotted by someone at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and asked to fill a vacant non-speaking role in the MFA company’s production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. That same summer, we went downtown and participated as extras in the film Long Walk Home. As high school progressed, we put on one-acts by writers like Charlie Schulman at school while I volunteered to help out backstage in the evenings at Theatre AUM and Faulkner University’s Dinner Theater. That experience led me to apply for CCPAC’s Technical Theatre program, which helped me to land freelance gigs supporting road shows at the Davis Theatre downtown or setting up large outdoor events that required lighting and sound. From the dim areas on the sides of stage, I watched and listened to plays, musicals, ballets, concerts, and variety shows. We built tombstones for Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, tree-like trellises for Anne of Green Gables, an old living room for The Man Who Came to Dinner, and a rolling bed/easel for a ballet based on the life of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. We put on a stage adaptation of Dracula and the No Frills Revue. One memorable road show that I worked at the Davis was an African-American comedy called A Hard Man is Good to Find. In my spare time, I was going to see shows like Shaw’s Heartbreak House and Weiss’s Marat/Sade, both of which were staged at AUM. In addition to what was happening on stage, community theater in the late 1980s and early ’90s was a hodgepodge of local personalities, and there always seemed to be something to going on.

While other teenage boys my age were playing football in the fall and baseball in the spring, this is what I was doing. I quit playing football after my ninth-grade season to get more involved with theater. Of course, my conservative Southern classmates had a nagging question: was I turning gay? No, I just knew that football would never carry over to college for me but theater probably could. Besides, I found theater people far more appealing than our coaches, who mostly stood around in polyester shorts and scowled as we lost to other teams.

That year 1992 – 1993 in The Dungeon was busy. In a small drama department at a small liberal-arts college, substantial to-do lists filled our practicum hours. Classes were for coursework, and evenings were for rehearsals. To my chagrin, I got cast with a small speaking role in the first show we did, playing an elderly custodian at a girls’ convent-school. But I did the best I could, patterning the portrayal after the foreman at my landscaping job the summer before. That show had a mostly female cast, which suited our mostly female department, and the same was true for the winter show: Jimmy Dean. I got to hang back for that one and mostly did set construction and other prep work. Then the spring brought a children’s show, The Apple Tree, and having the job of stage manager put me back in my element.

But my time in theater was coming to a close in the spring of 1993. Several factors played a role in my decision to go in a different direction, among them a newfound desire to become a writer. That meant a major life change, since theater people really concentrate their time on doing shows. Leaving that life, it was hard to maintain those friendships, since everyone else kept joining the casts for the next shows and spending their evenings on lines and blocking. Though I put theatre behind me, I took something important away from those years – ages 13 to 19 – and that was a sense of how big and complex life really is. While other boys were trying to hanging out in parking lots or figure out how to beat their crosstown rivals on the ball field, I was experiencing nightly run-throughs of plays that carried my mind far beyond my hometown. I learned about loneliness and eccentricity from Carson McCullers’s Ballad of the Sad Cafe and about the passage of time from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town— things that classmates and coaches could never have taught me.

Though I was swimming upstream by getting involved in theatre in the 1980s–’90s culture of the Deep South, which created unique difficulties in daily life, I was damn lucky to have gone feral at an early age. Theatre was not anything my parents encouraged . . . or even supported. (In fact, they got divorced when I was fifteen, so I became even more unsupervised.) I was spending relatively little time with people my own age while getting to know some unexpectedly wonderful, creative people. The adults in the theatre crowd didn’t seem to care how late I was out or whether I consumed the alcohol that always seemed to be available. No one shielded me from dirty jokes or unseemly situations. A few times, old gay men tried to pick me up. In no way was I protected or exempted. And when you add all of that to experiencing the plays themselves, this ol’ boy was just going to come out different.

And I hate that such a life isn’t available to our most creative and unique Southern teenagers today. Not only is that subculture largely dissolved – too many are staring at phones or streaming a show, not patronizing local theater – the unsupervised quality of that way of life is impossible. Nobody had device to record anything back then, and there were very few surveillance cameras around. My parents couldn’t check Life360 for my location or text me that I needed to get home. I was there in the last years of something chaotic and free and exhilarating, when a teenager in a mid-sized city in the Deep South with ambitions beyond conformity and normalcy could encounter people who would show him other options than playing sports, going to prom, then majoring in business. With modern supervision rules and the omnipresent threats of potential lawsuits and being recorded, I don’t see where a teenager could even begin to explore life the way I did. One other thing I’m sure of is: it can’t be done vicariously by watching other people on YouTube and TikTok. Nope, you gotta get out there and live it firsthand.