Curtain down

It hit me in the past few hours that my last opening night was a year ago.  The beginning of an end.  Not THE end.  Life is too fickle to make such decisive proclamations.  But, for the immediate, it is an end.

In the year since, I have had many conversations with people anticipating the details of my latest theatrical production.  And I’ve explained lightly that I’m not doing theater.  Sometimes I just left it there.  Other times – mostly when people looked at me in disbelief and asked me why – I gave a truncated version of my theatrical food poisoning.

I think part of the reason it entered my mind this week is because I still work in theater.  Thus I am not entirely divorced from the drama.  I know too many people, who see me on the way to work or know the people I work with in the office.  Some ask me when I’m coming back, either out of politeness or waiting to ask me if I’ll be available to help out with a crew crisis.  And I think to myself as I glance over audition notices and postings for opening nights that I would like to do this show or that or see what creative electricity ignites from my brain.  And then… ten minutes later I’ve successfully purged the thought from impulse.

I said food poisoning.  Maybe it’s more like the time I made salmon before coming down with the flu.  It wasn’t necessarily the fault of the salmon.  But I associate it with being sick to my stomach. I haven’t given up salmon entirely, but I’m squeamish and if there are other options these days, I take it.

There are other things on my creative menu these days.  A really significant option, that if I direct myself appropriately, won’t leave me with much time to even think about theater in the coming months, years… who knows?  I’ve found writing so much more fulfilling and liberating and … while it is heart wrenching in a way nothing else has ever been in my life, it isn’t as disheartening.

I miss it.  Of course I miss it.  I miss the laughter and inside jokes.  I miss the friends who helped achieve the seemingly impossible in the brief time between dress rehearsal and opening.  I miss burrowing into the lines of a script and stumbling upon a moment by pure accident.  I don’t miss the drama.  I don’t miss the backstabbing and cruel gossip.  I don’t miss losing sleep.  I don’t miss being unappreciated or being too oblivious to appreciate the deserving.   I don’t want to go back to that now.  No amount of opening night adrenalin is worth that at this point in my life.

But I know myself.  I like Shakespeare far too much to not go back someday.  Eventually the sting from all that bad stuff will fade away like the sets that get struck minutes after the last bow.  Tonight, however, I think I’ll relish the drama of my imagination.  I’ll get a glass of wine and see what Lizzie does when Oliver walks through the door…