There was a suicide on campus recently. The name rang a bell, but I couldn't quite recall where I had heard it before. Then, as I was talking to some younger friends of mine, they mentioned that the person involved had done theatre, and asked if I knew him. I told them the name had rung a bell, and they showed me his picture of the front of the Daily.
I have been involved - in some way or another - in over a hundred plays, easily; most at college, but some in Detroit in high school and at Matrix, a few class productions in New York. And in my experience, when I'm involved in a play, the cast becomes my world for the eight or however many weeks we're rehearsing. They are the people I see most frequently during that time, they are the ones with whom I build up inside jokes and a sense of support and being a part of something. The lion's share of my romantic entanglements have been with females from the cast of a play I was working on at the time. The play becomes the defining component of my life.
And then the play is over. And I would move onto the next one. And a new cast. Sometimes there were people from previous shows I'd been in, but oftentimes not. New friends, new feelings, new inside jokes, new cast drama, and then, later, another new play.
The picture on the front of the Daily was of one of the actors from the very first piece of theatre I did at U of M - a scene with just a few kids. I vividly recall the fun and sense of belonging I got from that scene - but I had forgotten this man's name. I found myself thinking about how, for a few weeks, he was one of the people I saw regularly, had fun inside jokes with. He was a big part of my learning to feel comfortable with theatre at UM. I would hear about his day and he would joke with me about mine. And now, it had been eight years since I had given him a second thought, and something, some sequence of events in his life - with which I was now wholly unfamiliar - had led him to take his own life.
Seeing that picture in the Daily made me think of all the other people - dozens, probably - with whom I have had that same brief life of temporary coinvolvement. I knew about your life, and you were mine. The first and last shows I directed in college each had a cast of forty people, and for the life of me I can't recall everyone's name, let alone what happened to them afterward. I'm not saying that I could have kept up all those relationships, or that I could have done anything to prevent this man's suicide, or that I want to make sure everyone else is okay. That's all beyond my capabilities.
But it makes me wonder - where are you all? What ever became of you? Are you okay? I wanted happiness for you then, and I still do now. Do you recall our jokes, our drama, our hours of fun? What if I don't? Even as I write this all I have are mental snapshots with unclear details and emotional weight. Does it undermine the sincerity of my feelings in those hours if I haven't paid them conscious attention since? I hope not. I still consider my theatre experiences to be some of my most formative, especially those casts of forty. I hope you are okay.
I've been staring at this post for about five minutes trying to think up some sort of conclusion, but I've got nothing. It's late.
Then I was able to run a class I've been wanting to try since I started teaching, of which I have taken the accompanying picture. There was an activity to get students into the story of a refugee from Somalia; then, once a context for and interest in the issue of immigration had been generated, the students were tasked with creating an original piece of theatre which would involve an audience. Their audience, they were told, would arrive in one hour.
