The Longest Walk to the Smallest Room

I grew up in a village in Ohio. Not a town. A village. Population 1,200, surrounded by cow fields and not much else. More people live on my block in Harlem now.

I was raised Pentecostal, and when I was eight or nine years old, I was told I had been called to be a pastor. Not asked. Told. There was no questioning that kind of declaration. It shaped everything that followed. Where I went to school. What I studied. What I was allowed to want. My creative instincts got filed away under "not part of the plan."

I had a friend who made trips to New York City. He would come back and describe everything he had seen on stage. The colors. The sound effects. Every sequin on every costume. He had a perfect memory for it. I sat there mesmerized. I knew this world existed, and I knew I belonged in it. I also knew I would probably never get there.

What I could get were cast recordings. Through the Columbia Record and CD Club, I collected everything I could find. Sunset Boulevard. Phantom. Les Miz. The Jekyll & Hyde concept album. I wore them out. This was my theater. The closest I could get from the middle of a field in Ohio.

Touring shows came through occasionally, but the nearest venues were two or three hours away. When you are young, without a car or money, that distance might as well be an ocean. I went when I could. It was not often.

1994

When I was a senior in high school, my show choir took a trip to New York City. I saw the original cast of Miss Saigon. I saw Damn Yankees. Our choir teacher was convinced he was going to get fired because there were bare asses on stage. He did eventually get fired, but for much worse reasons.

I was seventeen, and the voices coming off those stages were the same voices I had been listening to in my bedroom. They were real. The rooms were enormous. The orchestras were huge. The whole experience felt like something happening to me rather than something I was watching.

I had wanted to move to New York since I was about thirteen. That trip confirmed it.

Then I went home.

The Gap

Twenty three years passed before I sat in a New York theater again.

I built a life that had been mapped out for me long before I understood I could choose differently. In 2002, I married in my church, and for thirteen years I lived inside that structure. When that marriage ended, I lost both the relationship and the belief system it was built on. The two pillars of my life collapsed at the same time.

But the pull of New York never left. Quiet. Constant.

2017

I remarried, and my wife and I honeymooned in New York. We saw Avenue Q at New World Stages.

The building surprised me. The Broadway theaters I remembered were ornate and historic. New World Stages was modern, clean, almost industrial. Multiple stages stacked inside one building.

Then the show started.

The performers were right there. Not across a pit. Not framed by a massive proscenium. Right there. Close enough to see their faces. Close enough to feel the energy between them.

That was the moment Off-Broadway changed for me. The distance disappeared.

The pull got stronger.

The Reset

Then the pandemic hit.

Everything stopped. My second marriage did not survive it. And in the middle of that collapse, I made the decision I had been circling for decades.

I moved to New York one week before restaurants reopened at ten percent capacity. They took your name at the door for contact tracing. Times Square had maybe a dozen people in it. Every theater was dark.

I moved to New York for theater, and there was no theater.

But I was here.

New World Stages, Again

My first creative job in New York was at New World Stages. The same building where I had sat in the audience a few years earlier. Now I was working there.

That summer, I found musical improv. It lit something up in me that had been buried for years. It combined everything I loved. Music. Performance. Collaboration. It felt like access to a part of myself I had been told to ignore.

From there, I found Playhouse 46. I started as a volunteer usher, then became head usher. It became my home.

I remember one night standing in the back of the house after a show, looking at a half empty room, thinking this is exactly where I am supposed to be.

I planned to stay there as long as the theater existed.

It closed suddenly.

I miss that room. I miss those people.

What Comes Next

A friend and I founded Queer Chaos Theatre Co. because I wanted a place where voices from the LGBTQIA+ community, stories like mine, and stories I never got to see growing up, could exist without permission.

We planned to use Playhouse 46. When it closed, we lost our home before we really began.

It has been slower than I expected. Harder than I expected. Some days it feels like I am building something without knowing where it will land.

But I am still building it.

I think about that kid in Ohio sometimes. Sitting in his bedroom, listening to cast recordings, imagining a world he could not reach.

I think about the seventeen year old in a Broadway house, hearing those voices come alive.

I think about the man sitting a few rows from the stage at New World Stages, finally close enough to see everything clearly.

Every version of me was trying to get here.

It took thirty years. Two marriages. A pandemic. A complete reset.

But I am here.

I live in New York. I make theater. I write for the stage.

And when the lights go down and the room gets quiet and the show begins, the distance between who I was and who I am disappears.

It was always going to be this. It just took a while.