Overlooking the Kaua’i ocean with my med-student friends, dressed in scrubs and bikinis. Our room overlooks a black rock outcropping, and we’re 30 feet from the water. Surfers brave the rocks below.
Looking forward to falling off the map of the world.

Waiting in between locations, in between lives, I find myself in Kaua’i with the destination after this unknown. The waters are different colors here, darker, to my eyes, from Los Angeles waters. It’s the ocean, but neither the east coast nor the west – the waters here are free of allegiances to hip-hop and to literary theory.

And I am here, after a year spent in rehearsal rooms across the country, staring at pictures of trees, paintings of horizons, the recorded sound of the ocean and the artificial light resembling sunrises – here being woken up by the sound of the waves.

This is an environment that defies my theatrical conception of the universe. The ocean is neither audience nor actors. I once imagined, with TCS, that we would perform a Greek play on the beach, in a natural ampitheater, for the waves as our audience. But these waters seem too powerful to simply watch.

This is a place that makes me think without theater, and yet all my thoughts go back to it, like (I’m sorry) the waters coming back to the shores. This island is not about theater. But theater is what brought me to this island – the freedom of time and spirit of working in our world.

I haven’t gotten rich making theater, and I never will. But I’m glad to have continued to live my life with the flexibility to be able to go to an island when the time comes for it. I think this is the gift we have that makes up for the many privations of the business. A sense of freedom.

I imagine, as I always do when I get to a new location, a traveling band of actors, Moliere’s players, arriving on a new shore. This is Illyria, lady.