The Independents - Fringe Festival 2012. One of the projects I’ve worked on that I am most proud of. Loved this cast and was deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with this team.
Hi Friends! Above is a picture from a Fringe Show (2012) that I had the supreme pleasure of working on. When people ask, what was your favorite project to have ever been involved with, I almost always say this - Independents - Fringe 2012. This piece was beautifully written by a group of friends who had recently graduated from Yale. It was a folk-rock musical about a rag-tag collection of 20 something friends, who had been living together on a Revolutionary War Reenactment Ship (which was actually a drug smuggling boat), who were trying to find their way back out into the world. Sounds weird - huh? At the heart of this show, the audience experiences a group of young, lost souls acknowledge and accept that it is time for them to grow up and move on. It was both funny and endearing, illuminating a moment in time that all of us must face or have faced at some point in our lives. It spoke to everyone.
Anyway, I was incredibly lucky to have connected with the team. I just ADORED the material and I was working hard at scheduling actors and pulling sides etc….when I got the news that the lead writer of the piece, Marina Keegan, had been in a fatal car crash. I hadn’t met anyone from the team yet in person- I had only corresponded with them via email and phone. In two week’s time they were coming into the city for the auditions. I was at a complete loss for what to do.
One of the other team members, Charlie, reached out to me about a week later to let me know that they had decided to go forward with the production because they all felt it was important for her words to be heard and her work to be felt and experienced by an audience. I agreed, but suddenly my job had taken on a whole new meaning - I was a little terrified. I had to make sure the people I brought to the table would be the strongest candidates to honor her work. I had a responsibility to her words as much as they did.
Ah! But, there’s the life lesson - I ALWAYS had that responsibility. As support to a creative process - don’t we all? This experience forced me to go deeper - to really examine myself and my career. It changed me.
Being in the casting room with this team was a revelation. I was lucky to be surrounded by such talent and I worked my butt off to bring them the cast that would honor the work they had done and the work Marina had done. But, it was also difficult - sacred, tender, raw. I will never forget those few days and the moving work that all of the performers brought to the table.
The show was riveting and it was a hit. I’ve always wondered why didn’t this life affirming project advance? To this day, I have dreams of re-connecting with that team and producing it - finding a way to move it forward so more people can have the experience of those rag-tag friends as they sail into new territory and find themselves.
I guess all of this is just to say - GO DEEPER. Now’s your chance to really dive into your heart and explore. You have time. Yes, it’s not limitless joyful time, but it’s yours.
On the eve of her commencement, Marina Keegan wrote in a virul column for her fellow students:
“We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time,” she said. “There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.
What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over,” she said. “Get a post-back or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”
I never knew her, but I am eternally grateful to have known her work. She taught me an invaluable lesson by allowing me to contribute to her show in a very small way.
GO DEEPER, Hollyxo
