"Next Fall"

I love when a play opens with silence. The lights dim and the actors enter, the stage lights come up and... silence. I always wonder, how long can the audience take this? And the more they do, the more the play wraps me up and immediately carries me along. The first moments of a play set the rest of the evening in concrete. For the actors, for the audience, for the stagehands. "Next Fall" opened with silence, a beautifully-staged moment between two people waiting in a hospital. The opening line, finally, was, "funny, isn't it?"

"Don't you just love good theater?" My mom said to her crying daughter on the phone hours later.
"Yeah," I whimpered.

I am someone who doesn't cry during, but (truly rarely) cries after. But there was one moment this evening, during the play, that got to me deep in my throat; it overcame me so quickly that it gave my heart a start. Again, it was this silence. Two actors on stage, and one of them implores the other to just try praying, just once. We don't know in the audience if praying is indeed what he is doing, but the silence was so powerful. Turned fully toward the audience, sitting on the back of a couch at a 90-degree angle, his eyes only closed and opened. The most beautiful thing about the exchange was how long the audience stayed with him. There was not a sound. And he held us with him for so long.

For the rest of the play I had a lump in my throat and that squinted-eye, knotted-forehead face of concentration that only a good play can bring.

I walked outside the theater when the play was over and immediately speed-dialed my mom, like I always do post-theater. She didn't pick up. But I needed to speak to her right then, while the evening was there in my mind and the colors of the play still in my eyes. I needed to just talk to someone about what I'd just experienced, while watching the audience I was so proud of pour out of the theater. I dialed again, and she picked up on the second ring.

"You've got perfect timing!" she said.
"Yeah? What are you doing?" I asked, my voice already shaking.
And that was all I had in me. I was suddenly a wreck, not just crying but sobbing on 44th Street. The audience members of "Phantom of the Opera" streamed by me; one mother-and-daughter team even stopped and asked me if I was okay.
"Yeah, I'm fine..." I managed to scrape out of my throat. I pointed at the theater across from us, with "Next Fall" emblazoned across its front, as though that would explain anything to two tourists leaving "Phantom." They carried on, as did I, huddled into a nook in a brick wall.

I pulled myself together after a few more minutes of crying to my mom's silence on the other end of the phone. Which was really all I needed, just silence to share a little of this experience with me. I walked through what seemed a melancholy, sepia-toned Times Square with a bright red face, mascara all down my cheeks, and probably the most furrowed eyebrows I've ever worn. I don't think my face has pulled itself to normalcy since this play began.

"Next Fall" closes on Saturday. I am so, so glad I went. This may be the best theater experience I've had in New York.