closing matinee

The closing performance.

Maybe it’s what you expect. Maybe not. After all, it’s Broadway, the pinnacle of the art. The pinnacle of professionalism. You expect them to stay true to the show, even though they have personal emotions on a sidebar, running concurrent to the parts they play and the feelings they convey. Maybe they will find more to give to the character, thinking it’s the only avenue available. But, it’s not impossible that they will meander wildly from the script. Or even throw something out as an inside joke among only those onstage. And if they play little jokes on each other, will we be able to know it? Is professionalism, then, keeping the jokes from us while giggling at them silently? After all, they are people. Just people playing people. Just people telling a little story about these other people, and we are the people getting the story and its message.

But at the closing performance the whole thing has so many layers, you can hardly think straight. In the third row there is a woman who seems to know a scattering of most everyone in the theater, like pepper in a salad. She stands above her seat, turns toward us and surveys the crowd. (I watch her and I feel like I’ve been standing in that place before, looking at the audience, wondering who came for the ending. I suddenly have that lonely feeling another loss. It’s not even my show.)

Even at the closing performance you try and figure things out even before it starts. You look at the set for its signs of the future three hours. Can you see the theme? The plot? The characters? Where are we and why are we there, instead of someplace else?

At the intermission the crowd is oohing and ahhing, everybody is somebody because we all know that this is the last show, and we MUST be somebody because we are here. And I swear, everybody in this audience knows someone in the show. (I’m thinking about the stagehands, and how, for god’s sake, now they have to find another job, too. Certainly there must be people in the audience supporting them, as well. And does another, different crew come in to strike? Just a question.)

When the show is over, the standing ovation is immediate and we are swept up in the sad reality of a Broadway show coming to an end. Flowers, bows, more flowers, more bows. The child of one of the actors brings a bouquet up to her mom, and another wave of applause. I guess everybody just wants to make this sad moment better somehow. But the actor/mom smiles broadly with an arm around the girl, and the ensemble looks on like the aunts and uncles they have become. Everyone smiles, everyone waves, everyone casually makes their way off the stage.

They were just people telling a little story.