Raina Ames was a shy kid who loved theater.

Not a contradiction — a complication. And the person who understood the difference was Macomb High School drama director Maxine Joyce, who spent more than three decades building a theater program and an uncanny ability to see in students what they couldn't yet see in themselves.

She saw Raina in a community theater production of Our Town when Raina was fourteen. The following year, she walked up to her in the hallway and delivered what amounted to a non-negotiable directive: "You're auditioning for this."

Not a suggestion. An assignment.

Joyce cast Raina in productions throughout high school, put her to work as a stage manager, and by senior year had a larger plan. At the state thespian festival, she walked Raina directly to the Western Illinois University recruitment table, informed her she was auditioning for a talent grant, selected her audition material, rehearsed her, and drove her to the audition.

When Raina got the scholarship, the decision made itself.

"I couldn't NOT go," she said.

Theater had been in Raina's life since she was six. Her mother acted in and directed community productions, including plays for Macomb Heritage Days, and Raina had grown up performing at Macomb Community Theatre. Her mother was also, in the quiet way of the best connectors, woven into the broader fabric of Macomb's cultural life — which meant that when Raina arrived at WIU, theater department chair Gene Kozlowski already knew who she was. He looked out for her. People recognized her name. The community's care for her followed her from one chapter to the next.

Her mother had also made a deliberate choice throughout Raina's high school years: no jobs. "She wanted me to be a kid," Raina said. "She made space for me to figure out what I wanted to do."

At Western, Raina majored in theater performance, but the auditions and the rejections of professional acting began to wear on her. It wasn't the life she wanted. What she discovered instead, through camp work and co-directing a children's production at the community theater, was that she would rather help younger people discover theater than pursue her own career in it.

She stayed two extra years at Western, earning teacher certification in theater, English, and speech. She taught for two years in Lafayette, Indiana, then a year in Palos Heights, before calling Janna Hayworth in Macomb to ask if there was an opening. Somehow, there was. She taught at Macomb High School for five years — eventually stepping into the program that Joyce had built and the students who still needed exactly what Joyce had once given her.

The student becoming the successor.

She left for graduate school — Virginia Commonwealth University, an MFA in theater pedagogy — after the workload expanded to the point where being a full-time drama director, set builder, and English teacher simultaneously became untenable. She chose VCU specifically because its program focused on how theater is taught, not just on theater itself.

When she finished, there were exactly four university positions in the country devoted to preparing future K-12 theater educators. She applied for the one she wanted most. The University of New Hampshire hired her. She started in 2003. She's still there.

About 85 percent of her graduates, she notes with quiet pride, are still working in education and the arts — as classroom teachers, teaching artists, and arts organization leaders.

She tells the story of a production she directed, Junie B. Jones, in which Junie B. is bullied by a classmate who eventually becomes her friend. At a school matinee, a girl came to the talk-back, approached the actors, and told them that the girls right over there treated her the way Junie B. was treated in the play. Her mother brought her back on Sunday to see it again. She found the actor who had played Junie B. and reported that she'd taken the advice she'd been given — and things were better.

Both of those actors were Raina's theater education students.

"It makes me feel fortunate," she said.

That's what theater does in its best moments, she says. It creates a safe space for taking risks. It allows young people to try on different personalities without fear of judgment because it's the character making those choices. It demands collaboration — "you cannot do it without other people" — and it builds resilience, because opening night arrives whether everyone is ready or not.

"You can't postpone the opening night," she said. "The show goes on."

When she thinks about Macomb, she thinks about adults who knew her name. She thinks about riding her bike all over town. She thinks about her mother, who snuck a young Raina into the second half of Man of La Mancha at WIU on a whim because the opportunity was there. She thinks about Maxine Joyce — "people who noticed, people who stepped in at exactly the right moment" — and recognizes that she has spent her entire career trying to be that person for someone else.

Her advice to her younger self — to the shy girl who almost didn't audition, who almost didn't go to college, who almost chose every path based on what frightened her least:

"Don't spend so much time living life making choices based on what scares you the least. Just be bold. Don't hide from things just because they scare you."

She didn't. And neither did the girl who came back on Sunday to report that she was doing better.