Lion Queen

Cancel that missing persons report…Nora Vetter found alive and safe

By David Williams

If you haven’t seen her around town in the past couple of months, you’ve merely been looking in all the wrong places. I can just imagine the missing persons detective mulling this one over. “Piece of cake…Nora Vetter, the actor, director and emerging playwright… check the stages of Omaha” he’d chuckle, and the case would be brought to a quick end.  
 
While juggling no less than three other stage commitments of her own and appearing in two TV ads for auto dealerships during a recent five-week time span, Vetter also worked as a dresser in the “The Lion King” for, among other characters, those gangly giraffes that loped across the stage in what may be remembered as the biggest event in Omaha theater history.  
 
Dressing the giraffes, some of the more striking and crowd-pleasing of costumes in a show rife with one stunningly garbed character after another, was a major production of its own, Vetter said in a recent interview.  
 
“First came the padding, then the costume shell and gloves before I’d position the ladder,” Vetter explains. That’s right. The ladder. A rather ordinary six-foot stepladder gave the actor the elevated perch required for the strapping on of the awkward arm and leg stilts that allowed the giraffes to tower above it all and execute that laconic locomotion that so captured the imagination. The same ritual was repeated in reverse to undress the character, but only after Vetter gingerly guided the back-peddling actor’s tush to the proper position on the ladder.  
 
She also assisted in “swing training,” the pre-show practices where an actor who was learning the character would take their first baby steps in the strange giraffe contraption.  
 
“The swings gave me a real appreciation for the actor’s skill when I saw firsthand how difficult it is to learn to walk naturally in that thing,” she explained.  
 
The giraffes, Vetter happily reports, came off without a hitch, but she recalled a “nail biter,” as she put it, with another of her characters one night as she described the surreal scene of “chasing an eight-foot tall plant while desperately trying to fasten the last pin that held him all together” as the seconds ticked down to his cue, she said.  
 
Working 37 straight performances of “The Lion King” on top of her day job at an advertising company may seem like a daunting task, but Vetter appears to be something of an overachiever as she tackled three other stage events going on at the same time. This column gave warm reviews for “Resolutions” at the P.S. Collective, where Vetter wrote three of the one-act plays and directed another. Complimentary notice followed on these pages for “From Shelterbelt with Love 6,” where she directed three pieces.  
 
And then there was the Shelterbelt-sponsored reading of her new play, “Why Can’t This Be Love?” (also at the P.S. collective) that made this reviewer anxious to see it taken into production.  
 
I sometimes ponder the future of theater in Omaha and wonder where the next wave of talent is going to come from. Then along comes the likes of Nora Vetter and all seems right with the world again.  
 
And if she “disappears” again anytime soon, skip the missing persons report and just cast your gaze to the glare of the footlights.