Memorial

When I was 16, I did a summer production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the theatre I'd been working at for several years. Every year the theatre does an outdoor Shakespeare production on the stage of the downtown green/lawn, which happens to be right outside the theatre. The production was fine, I had a good time, met some nice people, and worked on my first Shakespeare play. But I had no way of knowing at this time that I would meet one of the most influential people in my life, my (former) best friend, Jack.

The rest of that story is for another post. The point is that Jack was five years older than me, and for the first time I was extremely close to someone who was not either significantly older than me or still in high school. We hung out almost every day all summer. One day in September my mom and I went to a reading of a play about the NYC firefighters on 9/11. It talked about the many men and women who had died, and particularly several young men in their late teens and early twenties. I became severely distraught at the idea of losing my best friend who was only 21. The idea of the death of young people suddenly became a very personal possible reality.

Shortly after my 17th birthday my friendship with Jack abruptly and painfully ended. That whole event is for the next post, but over the last four years I have thought of Jack often. I would hear a blurb on the news about some twenty-something who died overseas fighting for our country. My senior year of high school I switched to a different church, and every Sunday they read from the Book of the People the names and ages of those who have died in service in the last week. Most of them are between 20 and 30 years old. I always thought about Jack when I heard those names and, after graduation, about the several classmates I knew were joining the military.

Yesterday I went to service at that church for the first time in probably almost a year. They read from the Book of the People as always, and while I thought about those people as always, and Jack, who is now 26, I also realized that now I am 21, I am as old as Jack was when I met him, I am old enough to be those people who died in combat. And I prayed for the families of those who lost their sons so young, and thanked God for all those he keeps safe, and hoped that Jack is still alive, wherever he is.

The Lullaby of Broadway

So it's been a while, and I'm home for the summer. Time for a theatre recap and some philosophizing. In the last year, I saw (on or off-Broadway) Abraham Lincoln's Big Gay Dance Party (which was one of the weirdest things I've ever seen, and was trying really hard to be smart, actually, but didn't quite succeed), The Language Archive (which made me cry, though it may not have actually been a great play), The Scottsboro Boys (which still managed to get nominated for 12 Tonys even though it closed in December, because it was that good), Angels In America: Perestroika (which was surprisingly disappointing, Michael Greif), Fela! (which was wonderfully interactive and vibrant and an impressive use of media, actually), Blood From a Stone (where the most interesting thing was Ralph Finnes sitting right behind me in the audience), Rock of Ages (which I had seen twice before, but not in over a year and not since it moved from the Brooks Atkinson to the Helen Hayes, and I still loved it), The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (which I loved, and will write about later), Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (which was the GAYest thing I've ever seen, and I don't mean that as an insult, just as a fact), The House of Blue Leaves (which I didn't like, though the acting was fine), How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (which was quite possibly the most fun I've ever had in a theatre), and American Idiot, seven times. Yes, seven, and I'm not going to argue about it. If I ever get my room unpacked there will be a lengthy post about my relationship with the Idiots.

In addition, I saw more student productions at Playwrights/ETW/Tisch than I can count, and many many shows outside of school created by friends/PHTS alumni/etc. Not to mention the 16 shows I worked on as a director/designer/actor this year.

Playwrights often seems to instill a pretentious disdain for Broadway in its students. "We're theatre students, we pay obscene amounts of money to go to art school, and we know more than you and better than Broadway." And... I would probably (inevitably pretentiously) say that that's true. However, I have to confess that I still like going to a Broadway show once in a while. I get excited.

I mentioned somewhat flippantly earlier that How to Succeed was the most fun I've ever had in the theatre. And I mean that. I got to see my first childhood crush (who I've now watched grow up for ten years) singing and dancing right in front of me. And being ridiculous (and ridiculously short) with John Laroquette (who is ridiculously tall). Now, because I go to theatre school and have been well-trained to see harder than most people, I thought about the sets and the costumes and the lights and the sound. I cared about more than just the performances. The collaboration between the set and lighting designers was really smart. The sound drove what the performances were doing. The costumes helped you pay attention to whoever was important when there were something like 30 people on stage. Rob Ashford (the director) made some smart choices to get us on J. Pierrepont's side as he climbs the business ladder without doing any work in a time when people are working their asses off to get by.

Here's the thing. I'm not at all an exclusively Broadway junkie. I still see downtown shows, random things no one has heard of, anything I can get a free ticket to, anything a friend of mine has worked on if I can afford it (which almost without exception I can). But unlike a lot of the better-educated or more-cultured of my classmates, I didn't know about La Mama or The Public or Ellen Stewart or the Belarus Free Theatre before I came to school. Already in these years my horizons even just within New York have expanded immeasurably because every one of my teachers told me there was more than Broadway. I go see everything I can now, even if it's not brilliant, because I know I can learn from it and see new things that do work and things that don't. I went to see Holly Hughes in December and Laurie Anderson over winter break. That would never have happened before PHTS.

But I like Broadway. I do. There is something to be said for reaching an audience of that size. There is something to be said for the bat-shit crazy things Kevin Adams can do because he has a seemingly infinite amount of funds to do so. When my friend Kayla and I saw Priscilla, every time something ridiculous showed up on stage, one of us would lean over and say casually, "Hi, I'd like a flip flop dress, okay, thanks, bye." "Hey lighting designer, could we light the whole house with a disco ball? No? What if it was a REALLY REALLY BIG disco ball. Okay great!" And I don't think that's unfair, or that there's no value in Broadway just because it's commercial. The problem is that the majority of Broadway ticket buyers don't know about or write off off-Broadway (and definitely off-off-Broadway, and theatres that don't have "Broadway" anywhere in their qualifiers) as not as good because they're not as big. And I think that's wrong. Just as there is value in being a product of CAP 21 who will be perfectly castable in the chorus of anything, there is value in being a (minorly confused) actor-director-lighting designer(-stage manager?) who wants to and tries to do everything.

We are who we are.

(This post almost finished, oh, a week ago, but never posted.)