A Playwright’s Retrospective on Loss (in Three Acts)
My mom always said to “write what you know.”
[ Content Warning: This piece will be discussing prominent themes of death, grief, & mental illness; has mention of child death and COVID-19 induced anxiety. Please read at your own discretion. ]
ACT I:
No Homecoming
PLAY: COUCH PLAY, written 2018–2020
About a community theatre, and two exes reuniting in the space the night before its demolition. It is about losing one’s home and an identity tied to the past. It is about love and fear, grief and forgiveness when it does not feel possible.
When I graduated from my MFA program, I proceeded to spend the next several weeks in some sort of self-induced purgatory. Isolation lite — where I could see my friends every so often but it did not take away how much I wanted to be alone.
It was a bizarre feeling, seeing as how I had spent the entirety of my third year online, trapped away from the people I wanted to see most. I wanted to hear them rehearsing in the hallways, watch the way they shifted from actor to character back to actor. I missed the strange, charming, off-color anecdotes my Playwriting professor would offer us in the classroom — and how every person who entered that room would be able to share a secret with us.
But the moment we were released into the world, I felt something in me — topple. It certainly had not been the first time, as mere months before the pandemic began, I had checked myself into the psychiatric hospital for about a week. (That seems like too casual a way to introduce a life-altering event, but every story has its off beats.)
This was different though. This was catharsis in a quiet way, maybe almost a sorrowful way. There I stood at our small graduation, armed with a million things to say — and in usual me fashion, I managed some of it in a side-character stutter. Wrapped around smiles and gratitude and platitudes about the courage of the human spirit.
I was tired, though. I still am. That was why I hid.
I was hardly the first one to do so, either. One of my best friends from the program was a stern advocate for people trying to take care of themselves, because she too had endured quite a bit of strain and grief over the course of our three years. She was often the voice of reason when I lost my own, when I let people walk all over me or when I would make decisions that lashed out against both myself and anyone in the collateral zone.
Three years worth of loss. Three years. How does one reckon with three years of loss, in and out of the self?
I’ve lost plenty. But this felt far more profound, somehow. All-encompassing. Like it somehow reflected every single piece of that back at me and demanded to ask me just what it is that I want. Just what I was willing to fight for, because it is easy enough to lose that in an instant.
I demanded so much of myself because I was determined to start over across the country. I was blinded by the determination to make something of myself because for twenty-two years, I insisted I was not enough. One of my professors in undergraduate told me that I didn’t know how to take up space, that I make myself smaller to make others comfortable. After a life of feeling like “too much” (too loud, too sensitive, too dramatic), and “not enough” (not pretty enough, not bright enough, not talented enough), that left me with questions. Ones that I am still asking after the death of a self I barely knew.
My Playwriting professor, Edward Allan Baker, said often that playwrights spend the first eighteen years of our lives trying to get out — and then spend the rest of our lives trying to get back in, trying to get back home.
I call New York home as of this very day in August, and yet who knows where I will be in a year? I call this body home because it is the only option I have, even if I sometimes long to escape it. Body and mind have betrayed me just as much as they save. Funny how that works, isn’t it.
So I put it into what is (hypothetically) my thesis play, about my home and what it felt like to leave it and lose it. To try and forgive myself along the way for all that I have lost and hurt, and for what cannot be so easily explained. Couch Play is arguably one of my lightest works and yet I hold it so close to myself all the same, for comfort’s sake. It’s the piece that I need sometimes when I am still, still feeling so lost after the pandemic and after school. After being tossed out into the world, more anxious and uncertain than I have ever been.
It makes me feel a little more okay with it. Just a little. That I too can be messy and imperfect. To be “magnificent and a work in progress at the same time”, as actress (colleague, friend, originator of the role Janelle) Deja Anderson-Ross once so eloquently put it.
I hope people can see this play someday. It will make more sense then.
ACT II:
Requiem for a Songbird
PLAY: MOON’S KNUCKLES, written 2018-2019
About a young boy afflicted with lycanthropy and his caretaker sister, after a full moon that resulted in destruction of their shared home. It asks the questions of “what is home?”, “what does family mean to you?”, and “are we always bound to the fears that plague us?”
During my first year of grad school, I lost a friend. He was younger than the most of us who knew him, having befriended one another across the span of the country. This included one of my childhood best friends who stayed in better contact with him, but that never stopped me from caring.
I found out through Facebook posts on one end-of-November evening, and frantically sought out the truth for the rest of the night. Corroborating with others until we came to find out that he had passed away after a spike of complications with some pre-existing conditions, which resulted in him not waking up for a week. And then not at all. I broke down in my tiny dorm room, towering above the city, and wondered if the city lights would ever care enough to cradle this unspeakable pain.
(Facebook, I found out through Facebook.)
I cried the next day in class, sat in the back, wedged between two people who held onto me as my body worked its way through the hurt. I spent the next three days distracting myself as much as possible. I hardly spent time alone or not on the move, or sober for that matter, because that was easier than being consumed by my own thoughts.
I then broke down that Monday and called my mom, crying in the hallway outside my dorm room, because I had worn myself down to a whittle and could still barely breathe. I didn’t fly out for his funeral. I had been kindly advised against it because I was in a tight bind with circumstances, drawing into the end of the semester. I’ve always struggled to articulate myself aloud, and that certainly was one of those times. My friend insisted it was fine, and a couple others went too — also flying out for it. I always hope it gave them a sense of peace, even as it continues to be difficult. Surprising, even. Grief is never the same story twice.
I still haven’t forgiven myself entirely for that. Nor have I visited his grave. I’ve made peace with the loss but I know that seeing it will push me back several steps in the process. There doesn’t seem to be a good answer. Feeling sorry for myself isn’t a great answer either, so I guess this might be why I felt it important to include this.
I’m not going to name him for obvious reasons, so let’s just call him Robin. Robin was kind of like our kid brother, but the really smart kind that we all knew was going to surpass us in most everything someday. He was well on his way too. He sort of embodied the actual meaning of ‘courage of the human spirit’, defying the odds of any limitations he might have had. He was a dancer, a writer, something of a creative genius and a smart-mouth. There are people around me now that remind me of him, and it makes him feel less far away.
Griffin, the main character of Moon’s Knuckles, is a connection for me to an even stranger, emptier time. Griffin is a bird too big for his cage and he rattles and shakes it right until it breaks. I think there was undoubtedly a time during school — graduate school, certainly — where we all had felt that way. (He is also a literal werewolf, which was essentially a roundabout way for me to talk about my own experience with mental illness, with a fear of one’s self and what is to come. What I have lost and what I could lose.)
We are all looking to live so much, to be so much, that we do not always understand just how easy it is for everything to fall apart. Maybe that’s a privilege in itself, to forget every once in a while that the world is painstakingly fragile.
He also reminds me of Robin, though. He reminds me of a time when the world felt wide open, yet I did not know just how much I needed to lose in order to live. Losing a dear friend is never a part of that plan, and I often wonder what could be if he was still sitting next to us. But we have to find reason out of madness, right? I try to tell myself that, anyway.
— and he reminds me that there are always reasons to wait out what feels like the end of the world, because surely there has to be something else on the other side.
The week I had in the psychiatric hospital made me want to rewrite this piece. I have a different story to tell, however much it will always have its roots.
ACT III: Back to the Earth
PLAY: MISS GODWIN & THE MONSTER WITHIN, written 2020–2021
About the sole surviving son of a famous author, who along with his wife digs up her life’s keepings. It is about the creation of the classic novel Frankenstein and about the tumultuous paths in life that got her there. It is about genius and greatness and the lessons we must learn from grief.
I suppose it’s no surprise I’ve been writing about death for almost as long as I can remember. Literal and metaphorical alike. I don’t know, I guess I’ve always had some sort of fascination with it and what that even means to people. I’ve talked to my Nana about it and she has said before that we all have some tie-in to it, in ways that cannot be so easily explained by the world as we have come to understand it.
Now whether one wants to believe in the possibility of any heightened perception or not, I cannot make that decision for you. But my own dreams of my grandparents (or various loved ones) dying, to somehow indicate a death or great distress headed my way, freak me out. I absolutely chalk it up to anxiety personifying itself in the worst way possible. It is also something that I have tried to learn from, however, instead of always being afraid of it.
There are plenty of other examples, but the idea of it is that this lineage is rather sensitive. Aware. I learned about grief from these women in particular, about grief and strength and survival through loss, and it is a part of my life’s work to honor that. But even as I sit here, thinking about the very idea of it, I wonder: is it enough? Am I doing right by them, or am I fetishizing their sadness? God, please let it be the former and not the latter. I’ve read too much of the latter. Experienced too much death of privacy and the glorification of sorrow in seven years of theatre school.
I wrote a play about Mary Shelley, about her only surviving son, and an interpretation of how she made Frankenstein. This was a woman who had known a great deal of suffering and grief and made it art to be remembered long after she was gone — it did not take away the hurt. It never does. This was a woman who lost several of her children, who endured the turbulence of her runaway marriage (then cut short by loss), and a life of searching for answers in the wreckage.
The voice of this shattered family became a vehicle for me to tell stories I had been trying to tell for years, but in the middle of a pandemic when it felt as if there was nothing but things to lose, it became the perfect time.
We had an online reading for it in February 2021. It felt incredible to see people connect with it, to express just how much they had wanted or even needed to hear a story like it. To think that we all have endured death, in literal or metaphorical sense, in such a profound way. I know for a fact that there are life stories I will never truly understand, that there are losses far more devastating than the ones I know from the past twenty-five years of my life.
That’s exactly why I want to tell these stories. Because it’s not about looking for answers for the impossible, nor presume that I know what everyone must feel. It is to hold the hand of a family member, a friend, a stranger even — to look them in the eye and say “I hear you. You are not alone.” If that’s the one thing I can walk away with when all is said and done, then I think I will have done what I set out to do.
And if graduate school gave me anything at all, it was the power to be vulnerable, and to be okay with that. It allowed me to work with the endless storm of emotion I tend to harness in all five foot five of me. It gave me the power to admit that I feel lost, that I feel angry and scared, and that I will not stop telling these stories.
If you were to ask me who I was in 2018, let alone 2014, I could scarcely tell you. That’s scary too, to change. To die even as I live, to allow that instead of running from the inevitable.
Not unlike the Monster, not unlike the ex-lovers, not unlike the werewolf boy, I am still looking for who — what — where — when — how — why I’m supposed to be.
