But If There’s Still Time

I see these black-and-white photos of old men sitting around conference tables negotiating an end to a war, or whatever. I say to myself, look at them. They’re old. What do they care? They’re going to be dead before their steamship gets them back to London or wherever. Why do they want to waste their precious remaining years, months, moments (it’s all the same) in these stiff collars talking about bullshit that’s all going to be undone by the next group of old men in stiff collars.

Theatre maybe has the answer. Two shows in February, at least pointed to something important.

I was lucky enough to be given a role in An Incomplete List of All the Things I’m Going to Miss When the World is No Longer, produced by Dacha Theatre. It is explicitly about the end of the world. The idea is, it becomes known that a comet (etc.) is going to collide with the Earth and that will be the end. Contra the Bible, we know the date and the hour. On the last day, a group of friends throws one last party.

After we closed, I talked with an actor friend about the show. They asked what it was like playing a character facing the end of the world. My response was to say, basically, I (the character) wasn’t worried about that, because I had my own problems.

This was really true. The character had messed up, hurt people, missed opportunities and now he has one last chance at love and forgiveness. That’s what’s driving him. The “end” only brings it into sharper focus. It’s only ever now, the saying goes. We’re supposed to live like this moment is all we’ve got. And so my character does that. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t (spoiler, it doesn’t) but off he goes.

Two other characters had been in love from the moment they met, when one responded to the other’s ad looking for a roommate, only they never acknowledged it, remaining just roommates until that last day, when they finally say the words. It’s not about the end, it’s about making a beginning.

The same with Pandora’s Shut the Box Game, also by Dacha Theatre. It’s a similar premise. Only this time, the world is ending on purpose, the higher-ups having decided we’d made a total mess of it and they plan to blow everything up to sort of give nature a do-over.

Two young people, high school students, get together on the last day. Like the roommates in An Incomplete List, they have never yet taken the moment. I took a class once where the instructor said the only thing there really is to say to another person is “I love you.” The two characters spend ninety minutes doing basically that and it works on every level. It’s touching and beautiful.

So, about the old men in the stiff collars, the answer is, you do what you are driven to do. What they want, what makes them tick, regardless of how the clock is ticking, is to make their mark on the world. Get that treaty signed. Get their name in the history books. And that’s what they keep doing, right up to the end, whenever that is.

Maybe, like in sports, seeing the time remaining adds urgency and spurs action. In theater, we can give the characters a clock too, and watch what they do. It turns out it is the same as what they would be doing anyway. Living. Until the lights go out.