Next Show

So I just finished reading the script for The Guys, the next show I'm designing, and I realized why I've been putting it off for a couple of months, until the absolute last minute.

I don't want to watch, read or do this show. It's not that it's a bad show, or a bad cast, or a bad company. It's purely subject matter. The Guys is a play about a fire captain eulogizing his men lost in the 9/11 attacks. It's pretty well-written, not shamelessly manipulative, generally a decent play.

I just don't want to go there. The attacks on New York and Washington rocked my sense of the world enough that I still am affected by the memories. I knew no one that died, but that makes me no less saddened by the losses or guilt-ridden by the fact that I was relatively unscathed.

I went through several months of depression and sleeplessness after the attacks, largely because it has tweaked my world view just a little off-axis. I'm fairly certain it's a permanent shift, because nothing has shown any inclination towards going back nearly six years after the fact. The play dredges up all those sad and vulnerable feelings that aren't ever really that far from the surface, and I don't really enjoy wallowing in that.

So I get to do a play about one of the singular events in my lifetime, one that sent me into a half-year's worth of depression, and hope that I get through everything on a fairly even keel. At least I'm not directing. As designer, I'm pretty much limited to two rehearsals and one performance, and then I'm outta there.

But of course the play is being performed at the firefighter's union hall, so that makes it all the more poignant. Maybe I just felt a kinship with the firefighters who died because working in the volunteer fire department where I grew up was such a pivotal part of my life as a youth, and that sense of being a firefighter never really leaves. Because you know every time you get into the truck that there's a chance, no matter how slim (and in rural South Carolina, it's exceedingly slim), that you won't come back. But you accept that fact when you put the boots on.

So I didn't know anyone represented in this play, but in some sense I knew them all. I've ridden with them, laughed with them, and sat on the end of the truck after the call with them. But I don't really want to go back and revisit their sacrifice. Maybe that's selfish. No, I know it's selfish. But I don't care. I'll be selfish, and hard-hearted, and try not to let this project touch me at all. Because I'm very afraid if it touches me at all it will take me weeks to get over it again.

But maybe I'm just being a melodramatic pussy, too. Yeah, that's probably it.