In a recent therapy session I discussed the internal dissonance I feel whenever I receive praise or recognition for something I’ve done well, while at the same time, I usually feel a deep pleasure in being recognized. I remember once at an Olympians festival, a fellow playwright was introducing me and they got nearly every detail about me wrong, I was mortified and deeply disappointed to be so visible and invisible at the same time. A couple of years later during the festival and another introduction, the fellow playwright (and producer) introducing me said lovely, nice things about me that were 100% accurate, he also said “I know how much she hates being the focus of attention so will make this short”. I was mortified and pleased, I felt seen, couldn’t wait for it to end, and was at the same time disappointed it didn’t go on longer. Earlier this week I received a recognition award at work in a large leadership forum that was surprisingly specific and overwhelming. It felt excruciating. Like watching a favorite TV. show when one of the characters does something really really embarrassing and you have to shake the anticipation on their behalf out of your body by flapping your arms or bouncing your leg or pacing around (no, just me?). Not surprisingly, there’s some stuuuufff I’m still unpacking that makes me feel so much shame for being recognized as good at something. I came across this post from 2014 that also shows how long this unpacking has been taking me.

Today, in light of that therapy session, I remembered a positive theatre review I’d gotten for one of my plays and wanted to revisit it, because I’d been dismissive of it as a fluke; attributable to anything other than that maybe my writing had been good. Driven in part to also avoid the mountain of homework I have for my anthropology and philosophy classes due this weekend I decided to go through all ten pages of the search results that came up for my name. It’s not like I don’t remember all of the theatre involvement I had from 2007 to 2021, but some of it is hazier than others. There were some lovely little surprises. For instance, the warm ‘n’ fuzzy feeling of discovering how many of the actors, playwrights, and directors I’d worked with over the years had me on their resumes, websites, or otherwise had written nice things about me. It’s not a big thing or even very many of them, but this was not something I generally tracked or even thought to look for, so was nice to find. One of the inherent things about live theatre, especially pre-pandemic is how fleeting it is. Mostly unrecorded, and what was recorded, is usually not publicly available. So it was also nice to discover a handful of videos I’d either not realized were available or had completely forgotten about.

These monologues I’d written for a monologue writers group – little amuse bouche as it were to keep us occupied and connected during the pandemic.

• “A Leap of Cynical Faith” performed by Alan Coyne – someone writes a letter to their younger self having been given a mail bag that will magically deliver it back in time to that younger self, only they don’t believe it.
• “The Ribbon Incident” performed by Alan Coyne – a disagreement about the table centerpieces at a wedding.
• What was cool about this project was that as the playwright, I got to see multiple interpretations of the pieces. Here’s the same one “The Ribbon Incident” performed by Louel Senores

Another monologue, this one from “I Saw It” the play that was a collaboration with 7 other playwrights. We all contributed monologues to weave a cohesive full-length play about a catastrophic event in San Francisco that left everyone questioning reality… was it a supernatural being? a mind-altering agent released by the government? a battle between a powerful witch and a superhero? In this monologue, Colin Hussey plays a journalist who has been reporting the devastating fallout but finds out his estranged daughter was somehow involved and held in government custody. He’s standing outside her front door, trying to convince her to let him in. You can read more about “I Saw It” here.

And then there’s this recording of my first foray into directing musical theatre that I didn’t realize was available. This was a showcase reading/performance of the 25-minute version of “The Right Note” book and lyrics by Jerome Joseph Gentes and music and lyrics by Rice Majors for the Musical Cafe in January 2016. I fell in love with it and ended up directing and producing a workshop production of the full-length version in Nov/Dec 2018 to standing-room only audiences.

And then there was this. I had no idea that there was a full-length video for LCTC’s production of “The Laramie Project” which I performed in. (It has over 8.4K views! What?) This was an incredible experience in no small part because this cast and company got me through some of the hardest parts of grieving for my mom’s death that previous winter. It is an incredibly moving story and I think everyone should see a production of it. It was hard to watch for me. I honestly think I had the weakest performance, but I have the advantage of knowing exactly which moments I was standing on stage in a blind panic because I’d forgotten my next line. I’m not fishing there – honestly, that would mortify me – I just wasn’t as present as everyone else. I don’t think I was horrible, just not as strong. But that’s not what made it hard to watch, it was hard because one of the cast passed away after this production and it was powerful and heartbreaking to see her again.

The walkthrough all the links, including several reviews, most of which were kind of cringy, but not the one I’d gone looking for, was an interesting exercise in trying to tolerate a perspective on my theatre life that was more rounded and varied than I normally allow myself to remember it being. It was also a very effective way to avoid writing assignments about the ethics of artificial intelligence or how the human skeletal system is not at all adapted to a modern sedentary lifestyle.