We Don't Bring Spreadsheets to a Funeral

From our first breath to the last, art is how we punctuate our existence. It’s the exclamation point in a painting hung on your wall, the underline in the playlist you cue up every morning, and the period at the end of a poem read at a funeral. 

Pay No Heed was my first original production, premiering in Newport, Rhode Island one chilly October weekend in 2024.  The story follows two different generations in a seaside estate with a host of ghosts, some tragedy, and a zinger or two from a moody old sea Captain. While I was hashing out the characters earlier that spring, I asked myself, what does grief look like? What would a person who lost their spouse young say? What wouldn’t they say? Would the ghost have an opinion? How does it affect the next generation’s perspective? When I finished the script, I considered the show a spooky little ghost story with glimpses of levity.  On opening night, I had tears in my eyes during bows, having been hit with the (somewhat obvious) reality that it was not a spooky little story, but rather an exorcism into the years since my Dad had passed away.  I had, after all, dedicated the script to him with a line from Sonnet 116 - “Love’s not Time’s fool.”

Moments later, as the cast was returning to the green room, an older woman and her husband came up to me, smiling.  I pulled myself together and asked if she’d enjoyed the show, to which she said, “I have to tell you, all I could think about through the whole thing was being a little girl in my Mom’s kitchen.  She would play opera music on the radio while she cooked, and it just took me back. She would have loved this!” 

Life is difficult. Bills stack, kids get sick, spouses die, and just when you’ve about had enough, your Trader Joe's bag rips. All of a sudden, spilled milk doesn't seem like such a crazy thing to cry over.  Is anyone else losing it? Where do I go from here? What the hell am I going to do?  Then, you notice the painting on the wall.  The flowers are bright and beautiful and looking back at you. You throw your headphones on and the music shouts in time with your heartbeat. The woman on stage cries with you, even though she’s in ancient Greece and you’re eight rows back. The dog-eared book of poems reaches its hand out and holds on tight. Your dad, who’s been gone five years, laughs at the joke you wrote. Your mom, who passed away thirty years ago, sits beside you in the audience.  Colour, sound, and sight all seep back in, and once more the moment is bearable. 

Pay No Heed taught me the most important artistic lesson of my life: you cannot predict the impact what you create will have on people.  What makes you cry in rehearsals makes someone laugh on opening night, and one woman's psychotherapy script is another woman's trip down memory lane (or however the expression goes).  Most artists know that we do not create for our own sake, fun as it may be at times.  Rather, we are gifted with a talent that we then choose everyday to shape, challenge, and train so that someone, somewhere can witness that life is still beautiful— or exciting, interesting, visceral, meaningful.

So, why does art matter? Because on your best day - when the matcha is strong, the sun is shining, and all the world is the opening scene of The Sound of Music -  art is there to catch the moment and hold it still, saying "this is worth remembering." And on your worst day - when you’ve been shipwrecked, with no one around for miles and the water too dark to see through - art is the lighthouse that cuts through the storm with one simple message: You Are Not Alone.