If You Can Know Where You're Going, You've Already Gone.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Before I left NYC in July of 2004, I had spent the previous five years seeing every show there was to see on Broadway. I went to open dress rehearsals, got tickets to shows in previews, was given the Tony award tickets that my bosses couldn't use. After I moved that summer, I spent my time in NYC seeing friends, not shows. In the time between July 2004 and March 2008, I saw three shows. Three shows in three and a half years. I didn't even watch the Tony Awards last year.
Last night, as I sat watching (or should I say, weeping through) the Tony Awards, it occurred to me that it was quite possible that my lack of current knowledge about the NYC theater scene had been intentional.
Yes, it's true I am usually only in NYC for a long weekend. It's true that I rarely have the opportunity to go back for extended periods of time and that the majority of the people closest to me all live in that city. Time certainly played a role.
But more than anything, I think I couldn't. I couldn't keep track of the theater world because if I did, then I was wildly aware of what I was missing. If I continued to keep track - to read all the websites, the theater section of the NY Times - I was going to stay stuck. Upset that I wasn't there. That I had moved on.
So I left it behind.
I remember going to see Clay at the Kirk Douglas last fall and that feeling I got from seeing live theater again. Inspired. Invigorated. Excited. I knew that I couldn't leave that part of me behind anymore. I knew that instead, I had to just keep it tucked away for the time being.
In March we went to see August Osage County on a Friday and went to the opening of In the Heights on a Sunday. After three shows in three years, I was seeing two in one weekend. I felt like I did when my mom took me to see Peter Pan at the Colonial in Boston when I was five. Theater felt special again.
And when I sat in those audiences, I had this visceral reaction, one which I haven't had since I was 15 years old. It was the summer of 1988. I had gone to New York City with my camp to see The Phantom of the Opera. I watched the entire show perched on the edge of my seat. And at the end of the show, as is customary, the audience applauded. They applauded hard. Harder and harder with each actor that came on stage. And when Christine came out, the audience leapt to it's feet. The sounds of hands beating together swelled and all of a sudden, I realized I had tears streaming down my face. I couldn't stop it, I wasn't even aware that it had happened. The energy in that room was so overwhemingly HUGE in that moment...the actors on stage beaming, the audience in that moment giving back what it had received for the past three hours.
And that weekend, as I sat through the curtain calls of August Osage County and In the Heights, the tears rolled down my cheeks again. When the audience is just so electrified by what they've seen that the applause doesn't stop...I'm telling you - the beating of hands over and over again, so hard that your palms turn red, so incessantly to make certain that the recipients are clear that you are grateful for the three hours in which they just gave to you so fully and completely...It makes me explode. It's why I am madly and deeply in love with theater.
If you can know where you're going
The choice may have been mistaken
The choosing was not
You have to move on
I don't remember everything about the end of In the Heights - I know the last song was about being home, coming home...something along those lines. Those are the only words I can remember because the whole concept resonated so true for me. Sitting in the mezzanine at my first opening since I moved to Los Angeles, I felt the ease you experience when you share a glass of wine with your best friend, when you walk through the door into the house you grew up in and the smells of your mother's cooking waft through the halls, that sense of familiarity and pure comfort. I was home.
And last night, I cried my way through the Tony awards. I miss the theater. I miss the sense of community. I miss the art. Theater artists give blood, sweat and tears to put on a show. They are unbelievably grateful for the work they do, for the audience that comes to see them work. They write and rewrite and rewrite again. Not for weeks or months. For years. And those actors get up and perform live - eight shows a week. They recreate these crazy, insane, exuberant, ALIVE characters...every single night. There's nothing like the theater.
I miss the theater. It time to brush off that part of myself that's been tucked away and see what it wants to do. The lyrics of that song don't only mean what they seemed to initially...I heard them and thought about leaving things behind, focusing on the new. But sometimes moving on means refinding, redefining and recreating the old.
It's time to move on.
Posted byMeesh-elle my Belle at 2:30 PM
Labels: introspection, musings on life, NYC
I used to go to the theater all the time when I was younger, and I really miss it. Frankie bought me Wicked tickets for my birthday and I CANNOT WAIT :)