Lights on, camera out, action. For many students, the hours after school mean homework or a part-time job. For senior Terran Curtis, those hours are spent under the bright stage lights, losing herself in the life of a new character.
Theatre and drama have remained a constant in her life for as long as she could remember. Watching others perform inspired her to take the stage herself.
“One of my favorite parts of theater is being able to step out of my life and feel for someone else,” Curtis said. “I just love the feeling of being on stage and everything else is no longer important.”
This love for acting has been translated into the extracurriculars she involves herself in during school. Freshmen year, she had the opportunity to meet a senior who pushed her to join drama club, and that’s where she has found her voice and made goals to achieve.
“I want to create more of a space for everyone [as president of drama club],” Curtis said. “I want to have more people that can find their space, because seeing the way people find community and knowing that I can create that space is something like truly beautiful that I am very proud of.”
Her acting philosophy doesn’t just stay on stage. Outside of theater, she believes stepping into diverse roles has been the ultimate lesson in empathy.
“It’s not just the lines that I say or the movements that I do,” Curtis said. “It’s understanding the plot and the conversations from that character’s perspective and how they would react to these things and really feeling for that character.”
This empathy has also been translated into the way she interacts with friends and the people around her.
“She has love for everyone and love for the world,” Curtis’s closest friend, senior Claire Sigler said. “She is one of the best parts of my life and helps the people around her. Her empathy for everyone can hurt her sometimes, but she never tamps it down.”
Other than empathy, she has cultivated the ability to go with the flow. Going into a career that can be unpredictable, she’s learned to hope for the best and accept the worst.
“Failure is an opportunity to learn, even if it hurts, yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen her give up on something, and even if she did, I know she’d learn from it and try again with a new angle,” Sigler said. “Success or failure, Terran takes it as she goes. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t devastate her sometimes or depress her. She’s only human, but she learns and tries again.”
All these lessons have culminated in Curtis’s one goal in life. She aspires to continue her education in Butler for theatre and hopes to continue to inspire others and share her love for performing.
“I want to be able to share theater the way that I was shared,” Curtis said. “It was shared to me, being able to spread that to further generations and keep that love because, if nothing else, I know that I have the space of theater.”
