I’ve been promoting my upcoming set of plays quite a bit, so my social media friend group, who admittedly could all fit together in a modestly sized elevator, must be tired of it. But I wanted to post something about my experience this past week.
I was in the mostly empty Phoenicia Playhouse last night, just a few days before we are going live. I was sitting on the edge of the stage as Marina worked through lighting cues, Ginger crafted social media material and voices were echoing from the actors working in pairs in different parts of the theater. I was busy with the very important Directorial task of bending wires to hold a shower curtain in place for the last play in the series, and I could hear Mattie and Sarah Jayne near the concession bar doing their lines for “Coupling”, a play about the difficulties of making connections, that I wrote during the pandemic and workshopped via Zoom when none of us could meet in real life. Behind me I could hear Phillip and Deborah running lines from “Two If By Sea”, a piece that grew out of a simple prompt in a theater exercise. From the dressing rooms, the voices of Taylor and Zach were going through “A Walk In The Park”, a play that came from years of dog walking and making friends in the dog walking groups in Woodstock.
It was strange to hear words that I’d written, mostly while we were all locked down and isolated, bouncing around the theater as if little parties of jolly ghosts were gossiping in the walls. I recognized each sentence as something I’d written, but they were transformed now in these half-audible readings so that my so-called authorship felt like a shallow claim – the words that I’d put on the page were sometimes funny, sometimes dramatic, and sometimes doing their mule-like work of pulling the plot along behind them. But they were only alive because of what the actors were doing. Writers write in solitude, but plays come to life on stage. I don’t know how I have become so lucky as to find myself sitting on the edge of an actual stage, in a storied, local Playhouse, this past week, hearing my little dabs of toner come to life, knowing that these really great actors had committed months of their lives to learning lines I’d written, adding their experience and ideas, and turning them into art. I don’t know why it is, but I lead a charmed life.