In 2019 my dear friend Seth and I wrote an 80-page one-act play about the Detroit airport in a newly renovated basement-level campus bar called the Old Heidelberg. Because it was new, expensive, and incredibly dark, it was usually sparsely populated. Seth and I would occupy one of the few four-tops, loudly improvising scenes that we would set down entirely unedited. We wrote the play in about two weeks and submitted it to the undergraduate playwriting festival with a kind of shrugging confidence I am astounded to recall. A month or so later we were chosen as one of the festival winners, assigned a mentor, and given a few weeks to cast and rehearse our staged reading.
The mentors were an eclectic group of faculty members and “outside professionals;”ours was an in-house professor with a great deal of influence over the emotional wellbeing of Yale’s musical theater students. I should mention that I have tremendous respect for this professor, who is a ready and kind mentor to so many current and former students, including myself. However, at the time, as a performer outside his traditional sphere of influence (I only sang in one musical and very much under duress) he appeared as the self-appointed arbiter of taste for undergraduate theater. He was infamous for leaving shows at intermission and sending personal congratulations to select members of a cast such that the question “did you get an email” could reduce someone to tears. Our brief interactions had been almost cryptic and I felt the need to impress simmering under an affected indifference. So when I landed in his office to discuss edits for our play and he greeted me with a wide smile and said, “now I get it, you’re a writer!” I was heartbroken.
In four years I was credited in over twenty productions, along with several that I am glad cannot be found on the internet. I was in at least one show per semester (minus senior fall when I had ACL surgery) and completed the entire Theatre Studies course load and yet I did not want to be considered a “theater kid.” I thought my aversion to being associated stemmed from the fact that, like theater kids the world over, they had the reputation for being annoying, but in reality I did not want to expose myself and my desire. Instead I wanted to be seen as talented, but not yearning. Effortless, brilliant, cool. I wanted someone to designate me “Serious Good Actor,” without ever having to face the vulnerability of proclaiming myself as such. Of course, as the old adage goes: closed mouths don’t get fed.
When I first started considering grad school in 2021, my friend and coach said, “I see that for you, you love school.” It was meant in the same complimentary tone as “you’re a writer,” but again I felt miscast. The same anxieties crept up: does everyone secretly think I suck and won’t make it? is my varied interest diluting my image? Am I considering running back to school because I am afraid of failure? The answer to the last question was yes. And when I thought about grad school again in 2022, it was still yes. This year was different. Perhaps because I am not unemployed and much less concerned with how other people are making sense of me. Haley Nahman recently wrote an essay about the region-beta paradox, which she defines as “the phenomenon whereby, sometimes, a person may benefit from being worse off versus just mildly off, because worse off may mobilize them to take action to address the problem, whereas being mildly off can lead them to stagnancy.” I think I’m having an inverse paradox—because I like where I am, because I am more certain that I can achieve the life I want, I am moved to action. In either case, being worse or better than just “ok,” means you are likely to make decisions from desire rather than fear.
Last weekend my friend Claire asked me if I “hate to lose or love to win.” I would consider most artists to be love to win—we lose so constantly it would be impossible to go on—and yet, while I have gotten accustomed to the unending tide of private losses, I realized that I hate to lose in public. So I hedge. My summer plan was to quietly apply to drama school. I told myself it was because I didn't want anyone else’s opinions or judgements (still true), but it was really down to the fear of public failure. Unfortunately the rumors are true: hating to lose, hedging, backgrounding yourself for fear of being perceived as a person who wants things and is trying really hard to get them, is a sure fire way to lose. You might not ever be embarrassed, but you’ll also never win.
I am thinking about the weird elation of the Old Heidelberg. Charlie and I would would write and drink there until we were too drunk to write—or rather until we found ourselves in that pocket of alcohol consumption where talking about writing is so much more pleasurable than the writing itself. It was a bar for seniors who thought they were adults, especially those of us who were testing out the waters of what our post graduate artist-intellectual lives might look like: coffee, cigarettes, dark liquor, a slim scribbled over notebook stained with the remnants of all the above. That year the only other regular patrons were the drama students, hyper-expressive bodies piled into a booth, compounding as the night wore on without ever pulling up another chair.
this one was great :) hope you are doing well! I still read almost every edition