Camelback High School Masque & Gavel had an end-of-year tradition called “The Most and Least Awards.” Just like you’d imagine: Most Likely to Succeed, Least Likely to Miss a Cue, or whatever. Stuff like that. As secretary my junior year, one of my jobs was to print up the awards on my dot-matrix printer. Because I had one.
At the end of sophomore year, I’d been awarded Least Likely to Cry After a Performance.
That was fair. I earned it. I wasn’t emotional in that sense. I was generally either laughing hysterically with Matt or super pissed and bitchy at the world. One or the other.
Theatre is an emotional experience for the cast, crew, and audience. Unlike a movie or produced album, a live theatre or musical experience—while “the same” as the performance they just gave last night—is by definition an ephemeral event.
This exact performance will never, ever be seen in person again by a human being. Ever.
We understand and celebrate this instinctively as a species. We place great value, even in a world of instant global communication, on live events. On being able to say “I was there.”
In theatre (at least at the level we were working on at Masque & Gavel) we are put into a scenario of forced intimacy. Not in a sexual way; but here we are, playacting at enormous emotions — they have to read all the way in the back of the auditorium — and working together every single day for eight weeks.
We get close. Not that we necessarily get to know each other’s secrets and dreams like some kind of drama-department Breakfast Club, but we do get close. It’s inevitable and unavoidable.
And then it ends, all at once, after curtain on closing night. Ask anyone who’s been involved in theatre, they’ll tell you that the post-show blues are a real thing. You’ve been dedicating two months of your life to this craft, and then suddenly it’s just over. All those people you got to know and be close to are gone.
It’s staggering in the best of circumstances.
Every once in a while, as an actor, a show comes along that reaches even further. I can quickly recount specific performances I saw of shows I directed where the performances left me breathless. These were shows I knew inside and out, yet one particular night, it all came together in a way that transcended what I thought I knew about the show and its actors. I treasure those shows.
What I Did Last Summer became the first show to have that impact on me. The combination of elements — working with my best friend on stage, working with my ex-girlfriend, who I was and remain dear friends with, and having my first bona fide lead role — all worked together to build something in the background of rehearsals that I wasn’t aware of at the time.
Also at work was the steady energy of my co-star, Marii. I’d known Marii a couple of years, mostly as a “friend-of-a-friend’s-girlfriend” kind of thing. She’d been “around” but never really spent a lot of time with me or my group.
Then, somewhat out of nowhere, she was cast as Anna Trumbull, WIDLS’s version of Mr. Miyagi, who mentors and guides my character, 14-year-old Charlie, through adolescence and art over one fateful summer in 1945.
The language of the show is such that Anna and Charlie’s relationship grows and blooms throughout the show; conversations about art and passion and potential. When you repeat lines like that over and over for eight weeks, you kinda start to feel them.
We had a pretty full house on closing night. Hundreds of people. And right from the get-go, when I walked out on stage to say my first line — “This is a play about me when I was fourteen” — we had them.
It’s a hard thing to describe if you’ve never done public speaking, acting, or other performing. But you’ve felt it as an audience member at least. There’s this quiet focus, rapt attention, a sort of gentle vibration in the audience as everyone, including you, can’t wait to see what happens next.
As a performer, being able to produce this sort of breathless anticipation can be learned, but it can never be taught. You either pick up how to conduct an audience like a maestro does a symphony, or you don’t. There are far too many variables.
(I’m not saying I was great at this. I have plenty of shows on my resume that are…just good. Not bad, but not stellar either. And one or two come to mind that I apologize to every member of the audience who saw it.)
But that closing night of What I Did Last Summer…man, we were humming. Everything clicked in that ethereal, almost spectral way that live theatre does sometimes, where I was completely dialed in as Charlie. We were in flow state.
I think that’s why what happened next was sort of inevitable.
At the end of the show, Charlie is leaving for home and Anna has been ostracized from the community for the final time — her proto-hippie, artsy-fartsy hijinks have no place in conservative Rose Hill. Standing on the deck where she spends the entire show, Marii as Anna takes my shoulders between her hands and gently kisses me on the forehead. Same as we’d always done it in rehearsal, same as we’d done it in every performance.
But this time…this night…
Something else happened.
I’m not sure if you can see it on the videotape I have of the show, but unlike every other time we’d done this final scene, Marii leaned closer and put her forehead against mine. Then she gently squeezed her hands on my shoulders.
There’s a thing called mindfulness where you are 100% present in a moment. Time stops, just for a heartbeat, and that beat lasts both forever and for no time at all.
It happened then. I don’t know why. Looking back, I think we had just poured so much of ourselves into that show that, knowing it was ending, we had to sit with it a moment. That’s all it was, was a moment in time. Not even three seconds. Yet it lasted a lifetime.
In that gentle touch, Marii seemed to say so many things at once: Thank you, and I will miss this, and We did it. That’s what I felt, anyway.
Then it was over, and we resumed our blocking to wrap up the show.
My final lines ended like my first lines began, breaking the fourth wall to address the audience:
“So I tried photography in boarding school. And took up writing in college. And finally, last summer…”
I look over at Anna, standing tall and proud on her deck, her eyes on the horizon.
“…I wrote this play.”
I choked on that line. I got it out, but only barely. Everything inside me was tightening on a spool. Grief and gratitude and joy and fear and the uncertainty of what tomorrow might bring.
After our curtain call, I wept alone in the darkened hallway backstage. There was no other way to express what I was feeling.
Least Likely to Cry After a Performance, eh?
Why do I write young adult fiction? Why write stories about kids in a 1990s drama department in Phoenix, Arizona?
Because I’ve been chasing that moment ever since. Not to “recapture my misspent youth” — my youth was not misspent at all, thanks — and not to “relive the good old days.”
No, it’s not that.
It’s more like, honestly, a drug. Looking for the high I got that night, the inexplicable mixture of emotions that makes us human. It doesn’t happen very often, but when I write and revise and edit and rewrite some more, telling the story of these kids who we were…
Sometimes? Just sometimes?
I can feel Marii’s hands on my shoulders, her forehead against mine, and that endless yet all-too-brief moment.
If I do my job…you will, too.
Read more like this over at my Substack. Always free.