Theater/Writing
When the inflatable couch arrived, I knew the play would be a success. Now I could see the physical space that my characters had been occupying in my mind. I had spent months researching, writing and rewriting my play Harry and Greg, but I only had a few hours to figure out the sound cues, costume changes, and how the microphones worked. The five minutes before my entrance were agonizing but once I said my first line, I barely noticed the hour go by. After we’d taken our bows, I was proud–not because of the compliments I got from my parents and my friends, but because I could see in their faces that they felt something. In that hour, they had grappled with questions about friendship, identity, alienation, and growing up. That night was the culmination of a lot of work. Some of that work was in direct preparation for my play, like reading books on playwriting, but most of it happened when I didn’t even realize it.
My favorite English teacher, Phil, taught me how to read in ninth grade. Not literally read, of course, but he taught me how to read beyond the words on the page. Whenever something notable happened in the text, Phil told us that a hammer should’ve hit us on the head. When he retired the next year, I knew exactly what I needed to do: start a book club with Phil. I convinced two friends to come with me to meet him every other week at the Housing Works Bookstore. We read The Phantom Tollbooth and Jane Eyre and discussed the Doldrums and Jane’s mistreatment in boarding school. Phil was always there with a book in hand and I was always ready to have a hammer hit me on the head.
I’ve never had to listen as much as I did in Feminist Literature and Tea club. I always joke with my co-founder, Margaret, that she brings the feminist literature and I bring the tea. Tea makes people comfortable; it’s like having a cat on your lap. The presence of tea in that club makes us all more open to having discussions about difficult issues like the racism found in the feminist movement. I am the only cisgendered heterosexual man in the Feminist Literature and Tea Club so I mainly drink tea, read and listen because there is so much for me to learn.
I’ve been experimenting with telling stories with my best friend Oscar since seventh grade with the films we make for our twenty-five YouTube subscribers, like Dressed and Super-ed, a movie about two sad, pathetic superheroes. Recently we decided to go bigger. Oscar’s favorite bike shop was going out of business and the owner had given him a mannequin. She was our star. We filmed from 6am to 2am subsisting on Saltines and the Bee Gees. When we finished our fourteen-minute magnum-opus about a mannequin mother who traps her two mute sons inside their house, everyone hated it. Despite the warranted poor critical reception, we love Venus de Milo. We’d been free to fail, and we did.
Harry and Greg started out as a few comedic scenes I wrote in ninth grade about two boys who show their love for one another by constantly bickering about things like whether the Transformers franchise has any kind of artistic merit. Two years later I had worked those scenes into a full length play. I learned a lot in those two years. I learned how to find deeper meaning in the stories I read and how to create it in my writing, to incorporate perspectives that are not mine into the stories I tell, to take risks in my work, and to be ok with failure. Now when I sit down to write, I have all these lessons spiraling around in my mind and a mug of tea in my hands.