The Performance of Us

I have spent the better part of two months watching two girls fall in love from behind a fake tree on a stage that measures twelve feet by sixteen feet, and I have learned, through the slow and unglamorous education of standing in the wings, that love is the most honest thing that happens in a theater — because everything else is scripted, and love is not.

My name is Nickie Torres. I am twenty, and I am nobody in the Greenwich Village Community Theater, which is to say that I am everyone — I carry the scenery, I adjust the lights, I stand in the third row of the third scene wearing a cardboard box on my head to suggest that I am a citizen of a town that does not exist, and then the director says, "Cut," and I take off the box and go back to the wings and watch the people who are everyone else pretend to be something they are not.

Julia Park and Sophie Mendelsohn are the only people in this theater who seem to know what they are pretending to be. They play sisters in "Our Town" — a play about two girls who grow up in a town that everyone loves and no one notices, and who die and are forgotten and are remembered only in the final act when it is too late to do anything about it. It is a play about ordinary life, ordinary love, the things we miss because we are not looking. Ironic, considering that the real story of this production has been happening in three feet of stage space between Julia's hand and Sophie's shoulder, in the pause between lines, in the way Julia fixes Sophie's collar before every performance and Sophie laughs at something Julia says that the audience cannot hear.

Opening night was the first time I paid attention. I was standing behind the fake tree in scene three, wearing my cardboard-box citizen costume, and I was listening to Julia and Sophie perform a scene about two girls watching their town grow up. But what was happening on stage did not matter, because what mattered was happening offstage — in the gap between one line and the next, Julia's thumb brushed Sophie's wrist, and Sophie did not pull away, and the audience was too busy being moved by the play to notice that the real drama was happening in three feet of space that the director had not blocked and had not rehearsed and would never, in his right mind, put in a program note.

I noticed. I notice everything. That is my job, in a way. I am the person who notices the things that are not supposed to be noticed.

Rehearsals continued. Julia and Sophie grew closer, the way two rivers grow closer as they approach the sea — not dramatically, not all at once, but with the steady, inevitable pull of gravity. Sophie brought Julia coffee the way she liked it — two sugars, a splash of oat milk, which is to say that Sophie had learned the chemistry of Julia's preferences with the same attention she brought to everything else she cared about. Julia fixed Sophie's hair before every performance, her fingers moving through Sophie's curls with a tenderness that made my chest ache in a way I could not name.

They argued sometimes, too. Fiercely, privately. I heard one argument through the dressing room door — not a fight, exactly, more like a collision between two people who cared so much about each other that they had forgotten how to be careful.

"You're not listening to me," Sophie said.

"I'm listening," Julia replied. "I always listen. That's the problem. I listen, and I hear you saying things you don't mean, and I don't know whether to correct you or let you be wrong."

"I'm not wrong," Sophie said.

"You're scared," Julia said. And then: "And I'm scared too. But that doesn't mean we stop."

They made up after that, the way people who care about each other always make up — not with grand gestures or dramatic apologies, but with the quiet, practical act of choosing, again and again, to stay in the same room, to sit at the same table, to share the same fragile, unremarkable life.

I started writing things down. Not the play — the play I could read in the script, typed and bound and distributed to every actor. I was writing the moments between the scenes. The way Sophie laughed when Julia didn't know she was being watched — a specific kind of laugh, the kind that starts as a smile and then escalates into something uncontrolled and unselfconscious and absolutely real. The way Julia stared at Sophie during the final monologue of "Our Town" like she was memorizing her face, like she was trying to imprint Sophie onto her memory in case the world took her away.

The last night of the run arrived on a Friday, which is always the right day for a last night. Fridays have a quality of suspension — the weekend is close enough to taste but far enough away that you have to keep working — and I think that quality transfers to the people in the audience, who sit with a faint energy in their bodies, a restlessness that makes everything feel slightly more alive than it would on a Tuesday or a Wednesday.

The curtain call was longer than usual. Julia and Sophie held hands — longer than the script called for, longer than the rehearsal had called for, longer than anything. I saw it from the wings, where I always am, where I always will be, watching people who are everyone else pretend to be something they are not.

After the show, in the empty theater, I heard them arguing in the dressing room. Not a fight. A confession. Something raw and unscripted. I did not hear the words, but I heard the tone. It was the same tone as the final monologue of "Our Town" — the one about remembering, about loving, about realizing too late that you were alive the whole time and you didn't even notice.

Two weeks later, I saw them on the street. They were walking together, Julia and Sophie, and something had shifted. They held hands differently now — not the way they used to in the theater, when every touch was a performance, and not the way they had before the play, when they held hands without thinking about it at all. They held hands now the way people hold hands when they have decided, deliberately and consciously, to be the kind of people who hold hands.

I smiled to myself and kept walking. I went back to the theater, sat in the empty audience, and watched the fake tree from the third row. The stage was bare. The lights were off. The cardboard box was still somewhere in the storage closet, its citizen waiting to be worn again.

Some performances, I thought, don't need an audience. Some just need someone who's watching.

And I was watching. I am watching. I will keep watching, because watching is what I do. It is my job, in a way. It is my gift. It is my curse. It is, perhaps, the only honest thing I have ever done.

Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication.
Objective Code (OTMES-v2): M1=4.0 M2=6.0 M3=5.0 M4=8.0 M9=7.0 N1=0.70 N2=0.30 K1=0.70 K2=0.30 TI=22.0 Theta=225.0 Style=NewYorkRealism



Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication.