After second preview, the director and I spent some time talking to one of the house managers tonight, who, before becoming a head usher and SM had other lives as a paramedic, a firefighter, a ranger, and 30 years as a flight attendant. He went from managing audiences in airplanes to audiences in theaters. And he wants to become an Equity membership candidate and stage manager.

I’m so amazed by all the people who have to come together to make theater possible, from such different walks of life. For someone to take up house management after retiring from a long career in a stressful job – that makes me want to work even harder, to make the shows better and the process more open, for the sake of everyone who loves this stuff more than eating, sleeping, or breathing. Because it certainly interferes with all three, more often than not. It’s not a relaxing profession or an easy one.

But when, as I did tonight, I heard a roomful of audience members gasping as an actress onstage moved her eyes from one object to another – when I hear grown adults forget themselves and actually begin talking to the characters onstage – “No!” “Stop!” – when I hear people breathlessly explaining the show to each other, translating the Spanish for their dates, debating the mysteries at intermission and weeping at the end-

I think that if I had ten lives to give to the theater I would willingly give all of them and still think it wasn’t enough.

This play shocks people. It deals with adult material. It’s poetic and brutal and honest and funny. It’s O’Neill and Williams and Wilson all wrapped into one. And it leaves you wrecked, like your heart’s been smashed on the stage.
When I watch audiences reacting to this play, I feel like I know what it was like to watch audiences at A DOLL’S HOUSE, before anyone knew that Nora was going to leave her husband at the end. This play has an equivalent emotional impact.

I can’t say anything more about it in case anyone is going to see it. But God, it’s a good show. And it leaves the possibility of hope open. No more than life does, but no less, either.

As one of the characters says, “There is no why. It just happened.”