Just today, in this matinee’s preview, the performance was stopped for a man sitting in the front row to be helped out of his seat – they thought he was having a heart attack – and paramedics came to get him.

The SM came on the God mic and asked everyone to be patient while they assisted the gentleman having the medical emergency. The actors went into the wings.

In a couple of minutes, the man was safely out of the theater. Then the SM called for them to begin again at the top of the interrupted scene, the actors came out on stage, and the audience applauded them.

They continued on through the performance, which I think was our best yet, and received (again) a standing ovation and had to come back for more bows.

We’re all in this together, after all – actors, performers, people – we’re all doing live theater, of one sort or another. When things go wrong, and people manage to get through it, it makes the entire performance seem more special somehow.

It was as if this shadow of mortality during our show renewed everyone’s faith in the enterprise at hand, the enterprise of life – reminded us all of how short our lives are, and how we’d better be together for the time we had. And be grateful for it.

Theater is a metaphor for existence. I know I’m not the first person to have said or felt this, nor the last, but I’ve never said it to myself in the way I said it today.

Theater is the ultimate defiance of death. I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, but I do mean it. Life defies death – so for life to reproduce life, to re-create it, is twice defiant. And yet every show is dying from the moment it is born, just like every person – and the doubleness of theater, life upon life, makes it twice more prone to death.

Nothing is more ephemeral than the live creations of living people. Which is why it’s amazing when they live – or they live on.