For a number of reasons, I did something a couple of months ago I hadn't done in nearly 20 years - try out for a play.
I had been a serious theater nerd (mostly musical theater) growing up and all through college. Then, well, life intervened. But largely because director Bob DuCharme is a friend I always wanted to spend more time with, I tried out for "Our Town." And lo and behold, I was cast in the role of Dr. Gibbs.
I knew I would have a good time, but it's been better than I anticipated. I knew the play, and I confess, I didn't love it. I thought it was OK, you know, touching at times, but the productions I'd seen lacked a certain something, life, I guess, you could say. I'd seen it performed with such modern minimalism and such New England dryness, that it seemed a surreal, sterile experience, as if Bergmann had gotten his hands on "It's a Wonderful Life."
Our production, well it may not win any Tony Awards, but it will have life. DuCharme has guided me into the play in a new way, and it is revealing itself to be a marvelously rich piece. There is ample humor in many forms (wry smiles and robust laughs) and plenty of poignancy, too. I now see whay it was hailed as a masterpiece and why it endures today (it is currently running on Broadway, too).
"Our Town" ends up having much to say about life today and how to live it. It serves up a chilling reminder to appreciate the things we all say we value in life (family, friends, community), while teaching us to feel wonder at those everyday, mundane things that we don't even notice. At a time when there is much to feel grim anxiety about, it's a valuable lesson in how to mine the rich veins of joy that are right there in front of all of us.
That's exactly why I decided to take the plunge and do "Our Town" in the first place. Life sure has its stresses these days - ominous things seem to be always on the horizon - and the way I chose to combat that was simply to do more with my life; to take a chance on something; to commit a random act of creativity; to join with other people doing the same thing and to work with them to succeed; to do all that not because we have to but because we choose to; to bring this play, which would otherwise be lying dusty on some bookshelf somewhere, to life; to feel the panic of stagefright and to slay that dragon and boldly inhabit Dr. Gibbs; to build something - Wilder's script is just the blueprint, we are the architects, engineers and construction crew; to be alive more than I would have been without it.
Now that's what I call a stimulus plan.