I have to say it was a revelation for me to work on Middletown by Will Eno. Every day working on that play brought out some insight either in the student or in myself, as we discussed these seemingly ‘not complicated’ scenes and moments in the play. Small moments in the day of one’s life. I wish at the time that I had taken detailed notes about all the things we learned. I intended to write something about it, but then I got busy and time moved on. There’s a moment in the play where a young man gives a woman a pack of matches. We kept talking about how to personalize that moment, so it wasn’t just a random act. I kept asking him where did the matches come from? Did they have any connection to his character? How long had they been there in his pocket? And then we came up with this moment. It was decided that the matches were from a place he and his old girlfriend used to go. They reminded him of her and their time together. It held a precious meaning. So, then in giving these matches to this new woman, he’s releasing the past, opening his hand up to the future. The students understood during that conversation the importance of deepening meaning in every little thing you do on stage. If you make the choice, it could just be a random act, but it meant so much more to this young actor having made this more personalized choice. 

There’s one other moment in that play that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. There is a monologue that is impossible to learn. The young man who was assigned that character and I worked and worked on it. They are seemingly random words. But as we worked on it he was able to find ways that his brain began to connect one word to the next word. On paper, they seemed to be coming from a completely different tangent. He kept working on what these words were triggering inside of him. One word might be something that made him happy, another word was something he was profoundly upset about. And they might come one right after the other. He was learning how to create an inner story that made the next word make sense to him. Then the day came when he had to do this off-book fully prepared. It was honestly one of the best moments I’ve seen in the theater. All of those words seem to connect for some reason and he fully brought their emotion to life. He was not jumping wildly from emotion to emotion, but he was making me feel it all. He made the audience that was there that afternoon experience all these words. We understood what he was going through, and we were feeling it. The deep sadness, then the quick change to a funny moment or a happy moment. When it was done, I had so much emotion running inside of me. It was like being on some drug. That monologue seemed to encapsulate the entire meaning of the play, that these seemingly non-important moments, like giving a pack of matches to someone, can hold so much meaning inside our lives. That life is filled with tragedy one day, and joy the next. We need to “be here now”, experience it, feel it, and be alive in the moments. It’s what the play Our Town is about. It’s what this play Middletown is about. In that one monologue, I experienced all of it, as if I had just taken a tab of acid and had a revelation revealing the mysteries of life. And the strangest thing is, I know that some people in the audience listening to that monologue, just heard a lot of words.