pavlovsdog

Doing theater must be a lot like doing stimulants. It keeps you up at night, gives you a high, leads to lots of partying, and when it' goes away it makes you crash real bad, thus leading you to find your next fix.

This is how I'm feeling right now. The play, Search For Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, ended last weekend. Some shows you can't wait 'till they're over, and others you dread that final curtain call, because you know a great thing is ending. This particular final curtain call was the latter. All of us worked so hard at, put so much of ourselves in, had so much fun doing, and bonded so much over this show that it was incredibly sad to see it go away. Everything must end though, such is the ethereal nature of life and theater.

(Just as I was writing this 99 Luftballons, which was our warm-up song, came on. Irony? Serendipity? Closure?)

Saturday night we partied, exchanged gifts, reminisced, joked, danced, embraced and tried to disguise, or drown, our sorrow. Sunday morning the withdrawals began. I slept in and mourned. It's not like I'll never see these people again, but we'll probably never share this same connection again. The bonding thing happened I think. A show is a relationship. It grows, changes, intensifies, strengthens, and matures. However unlike a personal relationship, a show is required to end. It's almost tragic in a sense, like a doomed love.

You do get over it and move on. I'm now working on The Tempest which opens in June. Everyone else in the show had other projects lined up as well. This last show, however, was a high that's particularly hard to come down from.