I have just completed my third theatrical production at Evergreen and, as always, I am going through withdrawals. It has struck me before how starkly different I process the closure of a theatre production as opposed to the culmination of other creative endeavors. Usually the completion of a creative project has some sort of product that testifies to the hours that were poured into it, at least to its creator. With theatre (certainly one of the most time demanding and collaborative endeavors I have undertaken outside of school) the fruits of all that work simply vanish after the last performance. All one is left with is the memories of the experience and hopefully the memories you have left the audience, for better or for worse. In live performance, everything about the work in the moment is so much more contingent than other forms of expression. It’s responsive and unrepeatable but so much more routine as well. All the rehearsals are primarily to make the words and actions second nature. Even the most poignant, funny, and moving moments become banal from the actor’s perspective, who has heard the same people in the same places a thousand times. In theatre, the challenge is to make the story new again, every time. 

At this moment I am re-confronted with the intangibility of what it was all for. I don’t get the same luxury that I get from making films in which meaning can wait and there is time, after the work is done, to reflect. 

Soon however, I will become re-acquainted with the surprise of how quickly my memories of  this work will collapse into one another and the sense of contingency they convey will fade. Remarkably, the habit of the ordeal remains, its source has no coordinate, no single point of origin. In the place it wore its mark resides the process. It doesn’t live in me, for it has no conscious spark on which to live off of. It’s like dead dry kindling, and when I reconnect with my cast members, it can catch flame and new immediacy appears through body language, quips, and song. 

A thought: perhaps forcing characters to look for closure is a good start to making them confront the context of shared memories.