Shawna, TCG staffer (at her last play of 2020)
I was thinking about visioning for the future, because...there's someone in my life, my boyfriend – love him dearly – has never seen a play in his whole gosh darn life, and I said, “Sir, we have to fix that.” But, we can't because we're in this thing called a pandemic. He's a designer, and he works for an ad agency and so he’s used to flexing the creative, storytelling part of his brain, and so the best way that we've been communicating about the thing that I do – this thing I love, which is theater, is talking about the experience of being at a play. And so, in a very funny way, we've sort of started our own little story circle that happens, probably once a week well he'll ask me very innocently about what it's like to go see a play. And I tell him a story, as if we're in some post-apocalyptic world where plays don't exist, and I have to describe plays. What I've been recently telling him as we talk about seeing a play, and the act of gathering and community, is this moment that I can't wait for that I think about sometimes just to soothe myself to fall asleep. It’s the thing that I think is going to happen when we come back – we’ve been so starved for connection and the act of going to a play can offer that to us. I'm imagining going to see a play and the artistic director is going to come out, and we're sitting in our seats, we look up from reading our programs (he’s also never seen a program before and I spend lots of time trying to describe the contents and what a dramaturg does). But when someone gets up on the stage and looks me dead in my soul and says “Welcome Back” it makes me emotional just thinking about it. The time where I can be in a space and know that everyone around me is experiencing something again, for the first time, and I am addicted to that thought, and I think about it all the time. The first conference where someone says, “Welcome Back” and I live for that – it's like an anesthetic for my depression about this time. So I'm thinking about hearing those words, for the first time, many times.
