impermanence

Posted May 8th, 2004 by Sean Williams

Growing up, I had the incredible luck to switch schools almost every year. I did go to the same school for fourth and fifth grade, and the same wonderful private school for 7th, 8th and part of 9th grade, but other than that I switched schools every year.

I was either born an actor, or this helped make me one. I got in some sticky social situations and when I switched schools I just switched personae. I was even a sometime liar about my past, creating better characters to have been. In sixth grade, I had people convinced that the surfing in California was fantastic. Y’know, because I was born in San Jose…

Ian’s blog talks about that sad feeling you get when a show closes and compares it to Buddhist sand paintings. This feeling of loss has been so profound with me that, on two separate occassions, I’ve quit doing theater. Along with dance, live theater is as ineffable as it gets, and it isn’t just the loss of the experience once it’s done. The fact that you can’t review a videotape or re-play a CD or go to the museum means that opinions about the art can be vastly different, and vastly wrong, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

We’ve done Lucretia a bunch of times, and one show everyone hated it. We did the exact same show as other times, but people just glowered. (It was mostly our friends- man, do they suck) (Just Kidding guys! We love you!) (bastards). There’s no way to go back and let these people know that they missed the show, because they didn’t. In live theater, you don’t do the show twenty times because you want that much audience, you do it twenty times because doing it twenty times is the art.

And you learn to understand and love the end of a run, you prepare for it. I’m never gonna quit acting again, I know that now, even if it means not doing it for a living. But you forgive your friends for telling you endless stories about being on stage, you forgive yourself for trying to one-up them, you forgive everyone that sad pause when the show closes down and you just keep praying that another job will come along.

And it’s that attitude that has made the last couple of days a little better. I think Jordana and I would be *very* depressed. We just produced the best show we’ve ever put on, in terms of everyone enjoying it. The writing was by two of my favorite artists, Steve and Mac, with a tiny addition by Jordana and myself. People cried, people laughed, there was singing and dancing and, at one point, the audience literally jumped out of their seats and started dancing and singing along.

But, we’re gonna keep making more shows. I’m excited about doing something that people might even hate. If theater is a lesson in impermanence, it’s a lesson I learned a long, long time ago and I’ve finally resolved.