This is a piece about AI. And it's not what you think.

Most of what you'll read or watch will tell you that AI is one of two things: a miracle or a menace. The future, or the end of it. And theater people mostly reach for the same bin, because we've watched what "disruption" did to every art form it walked into. The fear is earned.

I'm not going to negate any of that.

The truth is, deciding that AI is just plain "bad" is easy, coherent, and comfortable. So it makes sense there's a whole other crowd who've decided that it's the greatest innovation in recorded history.

That's a stark contrast. All or nothing. Heaven or hell. Good or bad.

This week, I want to break open that binary and try to understand what we mean when we say AI—and if it's truly the overture of theater's final bow.

5, 6, 7, 8.

The Bucket

The name "AI" has taken on an enormous identity.

In some ways, it's stopped meaning anything. Suno swallowing 61,000 songs without consent so it can spit out a soundalike—that's a real harm, and the artists suing are right to be furious.

But "AI" also covers the predictive text that finished this sen—see, you knew where that was going, and so did your phone, and it's been doing that since 2014. It covers the dynamic pricing that decides what your Schmigadoon ticket costs tonight. It covers the lighting board that's been taking real-time cues and firing them back with inhuman precision since the Strand Memory console shipped in 1976. We lived alongside every bit of it for years and called it necessary innovation.

"AI is bad" is a mood wearing the costume of an argument. And the mood swallows the only question worth asking: what the thing is being used for, and by whom, and in place of what.

Now that's a harder question.

Open Draft

You might use Microsoft Word or Google Docs to write a document. Screenwriters often use a different program called Final Draft. It's the industry standard, it's been the industry standard for thirty years, and it costs $249.99. For a lot of people who want to write a movie, that number is a door, and the door is closed.

Two weeks ago, someone released a free version.

It's called OpenDraft. It does the formatting, the collaboration, the beat boards, the version control—the whole professional apparatus—and it's free, forever, open source, sitting on the internet for anyone to download tonight. And here's the part that matters: the person who built it almost certainly could not have built it five years ago. They built it with AI.

A machine helped a human build the room other humans write their screenplays in—and then that human gave the room away.

That's not AI making the art. That's AI helping make the tools, and handing them to people who were priced out of the building. For thirty years the gate was money—$249.99, or a computer science degree, or knowing the right engineer, or being stuck fighting with formatting in Microsoft Word. Talent was never what stood in the way.

That gate is quietly coming off its hinges all over the place, in every industry, for anyone with an idea and enough stubbornness to believe they can build it.

The Gold Rush

And now I have to complicate my own point, because I'm not here to just hand you a shinier bucket labeled good.

The same power that built OpenDraft is building ten thousand things that shouldn't exist. When anyone can conjure an app by describing it, you get a landscape full of tools that look finished—they have an interface, fetch your data, demo beautifully—and are quietly held together with tape and prayer. They work until they're asked to actually work, and then they fold, and there's no one on the team who understands what's underneath because no one on the team built what's underneath.

The rush to embrace is its own kind of blindness. "Anyone can build it" is thrilling and true. "Anyone should ship it" is how you drown. The friction that AI removes was sometimes just friction—but sometimes it was the thing making you slow down and get it right.

Sprinting in with both hands is the same mistake in reverse—the old binary flipped over, menace become miracle, the same lazy reflex in a different shirt.

The more honest position is the uncomfortable one: hold both.

This tool can open a locked door and flood the room. Both are true. The work is learning to tell which one is happening in front of you, every single time, instead of deciding once and calling it a worldview.

The Room

Which brings me to the thing I actually believe.

The more a machine can reproduce, the more the un-reproducible is worth. Every time the copy gets cheaper, the original gets rarer. That is basic supply and demand.

And there is nothing on earth less reproducible than a room of humans watching humans do something human.

The goosebumps from being part of a worthy standing ovation. The tears from hearing the person next to you crying on the first two "BUM BUM"s in the overture of Les Mis. The holding hands in the dark while characters on stage are falling in love.

You cannot prompt that. You cannot train on it. You cannot download it, stream it, or generate a second one—the bootleg is always a photograph of a meal. The whole art form is built on the one thing the technology can never touch: presence. Bodies in a room, breathing the same air, agreeing to be somewhere together while it's still happening.

We keep asking whether theater can survive the technology. I think we've had it backwards.

Technology, and AI, is quietly making theater the most valuable thing we've got.

This week in One Last Thing: the title I almost gave this piece—and what it says about a bias I fight every single week.

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This past Monday, 116 high school students walked onto the stage of the Minskoff Theatre for the Jimmy Awards. Two of them left with twenty-five thousand dollars and a head start on the rest of their lives.

If you love theater, the Jimmys do something strange to you.

Last year I wrote about the Jimmys from the outside in—how a small digital team turned a niche ceremony into a forty-million-view phenomenon. This year I want to talk about what the night does to the rest of us, the ones watching from the couch with a lump in our throats we can't quite explain.

Geronimo.

The Stage

In case you've never seen them: the Jimmy Awards—officially the National High School Musical Theatre Awards—are something like a national championship for teenage musical-theater performers. All year, regional programs around the country crown their own winners. Those winners get flown to New York, where for 10 days every June they rehearse together, get coached by Broadway professionals, and then perform on an actual Broadway stage in front of a packed house and a livestream that reaches millions.

And what comes through the screen isn't polish. It's love. These are seventeen-year-olds from Tucson and Atlanta and towns you've never heard of, singing their hearts out—for a lot of them, the first time they've ever stood on a stage like that. Undiluted, un-self-conscious, not-yet-bruised-by-the-industry love for this thing we all do.

It's contagious. You watch it and something in your own chest answers back. Oh, right. I love this too. I have loved it exactly like that.

It's the feeling the Tonys give you on a good year—the plain joy of watching the thing you've devoted your life to get held up in the light, celebrated, taken seriously, wanted. After a decade in the trenches of this business, it's easy to lose contact with whatever it was that pulled you in to begin with. The Jimmys hand it right back.

The Stakes

The Jimmys have also become a launchpad.

In 2018, Reneé Rapp and Andrew Barth Feldman won the top prizes. Within a year, Feldman was starring in Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway—at sixteen. Rapp went on to Mean Girls on Broadway, then the movie, then an ever-growing pop career. Eva Noblezada didn't even win—she was a finalist back in 2013—and she's since earned two Tony nominations. And that's really only the tip of the iceberg: the list is long.

The pattern is real, and everyone in that building knows it. You don't have to win. You just have to be seen—in that room, on that stage, on a livestream or TikTok or Instagram reel that reaches tens of millions. The Jimmys have quietly become one of the most visible on-ramps to a life in this industry that has ever existed.

Which means the stakes are higher than they've ever been—and not in some abstract, industry way. Picture being seventeen and carrying that. The most pressure-soaked season of a young life already, and now add a Broadway stage, a national broadcast, and the unspoken sense that this could be the thing. The break. The before-and-after.

It isn't an unfounded belief. That's what makes it so heavy. The dream these performers are chasing is genuinely, provably within reach.

The Second Sensation

Those stakes can also spark something in the viewers that's hard to name.

It's not quite envy—that wanting of what someone else has. It isn't jealousy or sadness either. The closest word for it might be grief.

We talk about grief like it's reserved for the dead. But you can grieve a living thing—a path that forked the other way, a door that closed before you reached it, a version of yourself who never got the chance to walk through it.

The therapist Francis Weller has a name for this. In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, he counts five gates of grief, and the fourth is the hardest to recognize: what we expected and did not receive. It mourns something that never arrived—a loss you can't quite point to, because nothing was taken. It simply never came.

For some, the door was never even a door. The chance came a year too late, or a town too far, or simply never came at all—so there's nothing that was held and then lost, only a threshold you never got to stand at. And watching these performers step through theirs, you can find yourself quietly mourning the one that never opened for you.

That ache, however, is the clearest measure of how much you love: you only grieve what you love. The pride and the grief come from the exact same place—a love for this art form so deep that watching someone else get to live it can crack you wide open. They're the same feeling, seen from two sides.

That's why you can sit there with wet eyes and not know which feeling they belong to. They belong to both.

The Strange Magic

The Jimmys do in one night what this whole business does over a lifetime.

The love, the longing, the dream held close enough to touch, the watching someone else get the thing you wanted—that's the entire arc of a life in theater, played at ten times the speed. Most of us live it across decades. Auditions we don't book. Roles we watch a friend originate. The slow, ongoing negotiation between how much we love this and what it costs to keep loving it.

The Jimmys take all of it and pour it into three hours on a Monday in June. That is the strange magic of the Jimmys.

Pride, grief, love, and showtunes: who could ask for anything more?

This week in One Last Thing: the feeling I almost mislabeled this year—and the word that finally let me off the hook.

One Last Thing is for paid subscribers ($5/month), which keeps The Fourth Wall independent and alive. Either way, I'm really glad you're here.

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The first week after the Tonys, the buzz held.

Winners trending, speeches recirculating, everyone still posting their dresses and their gratitude. A whole industry riding the high.

Then, sometime this week, it started to wear off.

Reality slowly returns. The eight-show week. The Wednesday matinee. The grosses report. The quiet, constant math of what will stay open and what might close, who's selling and who isn't, whether the thing you poured your year into will still be running come fall.

This happens every June. The season crescendos on one Sunday night, the whole industry exhales at once, and we slide into the strangeness of summer. We tend to treat that slide like weather—something to push through, white-knuckle, outlast.

And I think we might have it backwards.

We treat the coming-down like dead air, the empty stretch between the parts that matter. I've started to suspect it's one of the most important things we do—and one of the only things nobody ever taught us how to do well.

Let's get into it.

The Loans

A high is expensive. We just tend to put it on credit.

Dopamine is commonly understood as the feel-good hit—the chemical of the win. It isn't, really. Dopamine is the chemical of the chase: the lean-forward, the almost, the wanting. It spikes on the way toward the thing, not at it. It's the fuel of the climb.

So a long build runs you hot for months. Opening night on the horizon. The review that might land. The nomination you might get. Every day there's a next rung, and your brain doses it. You get used to operating at that altitude. It starts to feel like your normal.

Then you summit. The envelope opens, the run ends, the thing you were working toward is finally, simply, past—and the wanting has nothing left to want. The dopamine drip runs dry. And because you'd recalibrated to running high, the new baseline reads as a deficit. As gray. As is that it? As now what?

Then the other shoe. To do hard things on a schedule—eight shows a week, a body that performs whether or not it slept, whether or not it's sad—you run on stress hormones. Adrenaline and cortisol are what let you rise to the occasion. They're also a loan. They sharpen you now by borrowing against later: holding back the exhaustion, muting the cold you should have caught, postponing the feelings that never had the time to process.

The day the push ends, the loan comes due. All at once. It's why people get sick on the first morning of vacation. It's why Olympic athletes report higher rates of depression after winning medals. Why the cry finally arrives. The body senses it's safe, stops holding the line, and everything it was holding back walks through the door.

That flat, gray, tearful Tuesday is a receipt—the bill for having cared that much, paid in the currency you'd been quietly borrowing all along.

The Loops

Our whole industry is a comedown machine.

We don't get one peak. They're on a loop. A show opens and closes. A contract starts and ends. A season builds for months, crests on a single Sunday, and then—dark. We pour everything into things that are designed, from the first day of rehearsal, to end. Coming down is literally half the job. We're just not very good at it.

Think about how an athlete treats the off-season. It's part of the sport. It's where the body repairs. It's where the foundation for the next season gets built. Nobody tells a marathoner the recovery weeks are dead time. Recovery is the discipline. It gets coached, scheduled, respected.

Artists, typically, don't have that. We have a summer we're supposed to fight through to keep the lights on—which is real, and a livelihood, and I'm not waving it away. But the lulls show up in all shapes and sizes. The long stretch between jobs. The deafening silence after a project you loved ends. The plain, physical downslope of a wave that went up and now, inevitably, has to come back down.

And our instinct, every single time, is to fight it. Fill it. Fix it. Book the next thing fast enough that we never have to feel the floor.

But the comedown isn't a problem to be solved. It's a real, true, heavy loss.

Grace

If the comedown is a small grief, then we already know exactly what it needs.

We don't tell a grieving friend to hustle through it. We don't ask them why they aren't more grateful for the good times. We don't hand them a five-year plan on day three. We make them tea (or bowls of ice cream). We sit with them. We let it take the time it takes, and we treat the sadness as evidence that something mattered.

The comedown deserves that same grace.

It's letting the trough run as long as the crest was high. It's resisting the urge to stuff every quiet week with proof that you're still going.

I don't have a method for this. I'm suspicious of anyone selling one. But there's a better question than how do I get out of this faster. It's the one we ask the people we love, turned inward for once: what do you need, right now?

The wave is going to do what waves do. Rise and then fall. The only part we get to choose is how we ride it.

With some practice, I think we're more than capable of taking a cue from nature. Letting the wave carry us, arms open, shoulders relaxed, breathing deep and giving over to all of it.

Every last gray, gorgeous, extraordinary, ordinary minute of it.

Surfs up.

This week in One Last Thing: the comedown I didn't see coming after two months in LA.

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Last Sunday, Broadway handed out its Tonys at Radio City. This week, a mile downtown at the Garden, the Knicks were fighting for their first title in fifty-three years. Two cathedrals, one city. The drama!

I am, admittedly, not a major sports-follower. I am, however, fascinated by the theatricality of professional sports.

Regardless of how they appear on the surface, the Tonys and NBA Finals' DNA isn't far apart. Strip away the scoreboard and the stage, and you're looking at the same animal.

Let's get ready to rumble.

Two Temples

Walk past any bar in the country this week and you'll see strangers with their nervous systems wired to one screen, holding the same breath, rising as a single body when the shot drops.

The oldest theater trick there is, running in sports bars everywhere—a roomful of people who may have never met, agreeing to feel one enormous thing together, in real time.

Radio City did it with P!nk in a Peter Pan costume; the Garden does it with a tip-off.

Live performance is one of the last places in American life where we still gather, face the same direction, and let something happen to all of us at once.

Nobody Knows the Ending

The reason both rooms still fill seats in 2026: nobody knows how it ends.

Not the performers, not the crowd, not the producers who spent a fortune getting everyone in the building. The envelope is the buzzer. You can't stream the result early, can't skip to the good part, can't get spoiled if you're already there.

In a culture engineered to let us consume everything alone and on demand, the Tonys and the playoffs hold the old line: we're all here, right now, and we find out together.

The not-knowing is the thing.

Clutch

Down two, ten seconds left, the whole arena on its feet—and someone has to take the shot.

Theater people understand that moment completely. We send people out to live it eight times a week. A Tony performance is a similar dare: your four minutes, live on CBS, no second takes.

The athlete and the performer are the same under the lights—both have trained for years to make it look, for a few minutes, like it's easy. And you better nail it.

The Diehards

The Knicks superfan and the theater kid are twins.

Both know the numbers and teams backwards and forwards. Both hold strong, unsolicited opinions about casting decisions made by people they'll never meet. Both will defend their wounded, beloved, perpetually-rebuilding institution to anyone who dares call it dead.

Each one found, somewhere young, a thing bigger than themselves to belong to and built a whole identity around it. Spike Lee at courtside and the Rent-head who saw the original production 50+ times are running the exact same devotion.

They just worship in different temples.

The Long Wait

The Knicks have gone fifty-three years without a title—but the city never gave up. This weekend that streak could be broken.

At the Tonys on Sunday, another long wait ended: the first American woman to win Best Play in thirty-seven years and the first openly trans winner in the Tonys' seventy-nine-year history.

It's easy to think that fandom and commitment-to-craft run on hope. The hope that this will be the year it changes. The hope that the effort you're pouring in will come back around in some way, eventually. But hope can feel rootless.

Faith is a stronger fuel. Deeper than believing, faith is a knowing that your devotion and commitment are inherently worth it. Because at the heart of your heartbreaking team or infuriating industry is the real possibility of transcendence.

Let's not kid ourselves, that holy potential is not always easy to see. It's hazy up in here. But the shared pilot light of these fans and fems is a true, messy, unconditional Love.

Strip the costumes (or jerseys?) off and it's the same impulse underneath: what we're like when we love something out loud, together, with no promise it will love us back.

It looks the same in both rooms. Strangers breathing as one body. An ending nobody can spoil. Four minutes under the lights to get it exactly right. A lifetime of memorized stats and cast albums. A wait so long it outlives the people who started it. Whether the scoreboard is keeping time or the orchestra is, everyone in those seats is doing the same brave, slightly irrational thing: giving everything to something that owes them nothing.

And every so often, it gives back. The buzzer gets beaten. The curtain rises on a night you'll retell for the rest of your life. The thing you poured yourself into cracks open, and for one impossible minute the whole building feels it at once. That's the transcendence the faithful are betting on—possible, never promised, and worth the showing-up either way. Maybe this weekend, fifty-three years finally gives way. Maybe not. Either way, the faithful will be in their seats. They always were.

Down here, every week, the newsletter gets quieter and more honest — a personal note, just for paid subscribers, from the backstage of my life. This week it's the two screens I had going on Tony night, and what they did to me.

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This Sunday, someone wins.

A handful of names get called in a room full of people who—on some level—wanted to hear their own. And the rest of us watch. From couches, from bar stools, from dressing rooms in cities that are not New York, doing a kind of subconscious math.

Where am I in all this? Am I where I should be? Am I falling behind?

It's the most natural question in the world this time of year. And I want to take it seriously—not dismiss it, not spiritual-bypass it, not wrap it in a bow. Because the question is real. The feeling is real.

But I think we've been measuring ourselves on the wrong axis entirely.

Let's get into it.

Caissie Levy is currently starring (and slaying) in Ragtime—deep in the arena where, if there was a race, you'd say she was winning it.

In an interview with Paul Wontorek, she talked about her Broadway debut. Back when she was, in her words, "just trying to hang." Trying to be "a version of a Broadway actor, whatever that was."

She described spending a lot of that time—her phrase—"looking left and right." At the women "ahead" of her. Wanting to be like them.

We all do this. The involuntary audit of everyone in our peripheral vision. Who booked what. Who's in what room. Who got the thing you wanted. Caissie was generous about it, actually—she didn't call it a flaw. She called it what young artists do: you model your career off the people you want to become, because you don't yet have your own shape to go on, so you borrow theirs.

Which is true. And probably has been amplified by about a thousand orders of magnitude.

The glance used to be occasional.

Social media is the sideways glance rebuilt as infrastructure—a machine whose entire job is to turn your head for you, all day, toward the workshop you didn't get, the reading you're not in, the regional contract, the callback, the carousel of someone else's great month. Scroll is just a fancy word for look again. And again. And again.

All of it running on the same axis: ahead and behind. Left and right. Where am I relative to them.

And then once a year, the whole thing gets a broadcast.

The Tonys make the race look real.

The Tony Awards, ostensibly, are a prize for singularity—for the voice that sounded like no other voice, the choice no one else would have made. The thing that was so specific, so unrepeatable, that a room full of voters had no choice but to stop and say: that.

But the way the entire ecosystem chases it is by becoming more alike. Sanding toward the recognizable shape of the "Broadway voice," the "Broadway body," the "Broadway whatever." Everyone scanning the people who got "the thing", trying to move in their direction.

It's an award for being unrepeatable, pursued by imitation.

And that's not a flaw in the system. That's what happens when everyone is running on the same horizontal axis (ahead and behind, left and right). Horizontal motion moves you toward other people. It crowds you together. It erases the specific.

But the thing the award is actually trying to honor? That lives somewhere else entirely.

Think about what made the performances you remember. The ones that made you hold your breath.

It wasn't proximity to a type. It wasn't successful imitation of what came before. It was depth. It was someone who had gone so far into themselves—into their training, their questions, their specific and irreplaceable inner life—that they arrived somewhere no one else could have reached, because no one else was them.

That motion isn't horizontal. It's vertical.

Below: the training, the teachers, the failures and sacrifies absorbed and metabolized—all the shoulders you're standing on.

Above: the thing this was always supposed to be in service of. Something bigger than applause. Older than attention. Faith, maybe, or the particular shape of your own devotion to the work.

Inside: the knot of your experiences and memories and skills and quirks—immeasurable, intangible, impossible to fully see. You spend a life untangling it. And what you tend to find, and forget, and find again, is that the thing at the center isn't talent or technique. It's something inherently whole. Something that connects you to everyone else who has ever stood in front of an audience and tried to tell the truth.

That's the vertical axis. And here's what makes it structurally different from the horizontal one:

You cannot race on it.

There's no ahead or behind on a vertical axis. There's only deeper or shallower, more connected or less. And the distance between you and your deepest self has nothing—nothing—to do with who's standing to your left or your right.

Which brings me to the strange trap at the center of all this.

The Tonys are designed for the horizontal axis. Campaigns, comparisons, competitive seasons. That's the structure. And then the award goes to the person who most fully escaped it. Who went so deep on the vertical axis that they became unrepeatable.

We are running horizontally in pursuit of a prize that only goes to people who stopped running horizontally.

That's not meant to be a cynical observation. The pursuit of the thing the Tonys are actually trying to name has very little to do with Tony season. It happens in rehearsal rooms and late-night journals and the years of small unglamorous work that build the specific person you are. It happens when you ask harder questions instead of looking for easier answers. It happens on the vertical axis.

The horizontal race will keep running. The Feed will keep feeding. The nominations will keep dropping and the math will probably keep happening in your head.

But you can absolutely opt out of treating the horizontal axis as the one that measures your worth.

So if you're nominated on Sunday: congratulations, genuinely. What a remarkable achievement. And also—the thing you actually have walks back out of that room with you, exactly as intact as it walked in. No statue adds to it. Nothing taken away if it doesn't come.

And if you're watching from the couch with that familiar low hum of will I ever be there—hear me when I say: you cannot fall behind on the vertical axis. You can only be further from yourself or closer to yourself. That's the whole thing.

The industry will keep running its race. Let it.

You've got vertical work to do.

This week in One Last Thing: why I needed to write this.

It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which keeps The Fourth Wall independent and alive. Either way, I'm truly grateful you're here.

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When I was a teenager and into my early twenties, I spent my summers at an all-boys overnight camp in northern Wisconsin with limited access to technology. No cellphones. No video iPods. No TVs in the cabins.

But the Culver's in town? They had a few TVs.

That's where I'd go on Tony Sunday. I'd sit at a corner table by myself and stare at the tiny screen with the sound off. With cheese curds. Obviously.

I couldn't hear the speeches. I didn't always know who was who. I'd nurse a custard and squint at the silent screen and try to read lips. Try to imagine what the performances sounded like.

And I felt part of something.

Even from that table, the broadcast worked on me. What was actually on the screen barely mattered. What mattered was the knowledge that in other places—other corners, other couches—my people were watching too.

Here's the thing I understand now that I didn't then: that wasn't really knowledge. I had no proof. I'd never met most of those people. I couldn’t see them. I just believed they were out there.

Which, it turns out, is most of what loving theater is.

Especially if you don't live in New York, or Chicago, or one of the handful of cities where the thing you love has a physical address. You love it from a distance. You give three months of your life to a show that closes in a weekend. You weep at eight bars of music on a cast recording, and you trust—without evidence—that somewhere out there are people who weep at the same eight bars. You can't see them. You take them on faith.

Loving theater is an act of faith.

The Form

Faith needs rooms.

Live theater runs on a mechanism most of the rest of culture has stopped requiring. People in the same place at the same time, paying attention to the same thing, knowing they're in it together.

When a show works, the room does as much of the work as the stage. The audience gets its nervous systems entrained to a single point. Laughter cascades because other people are laughing. You hold your breath because everyone else is holding theirs. The cry at the end gets louder because the person next to you is crying too. (Sometimes sobbing, actually.)

I've written at length about collective effervescence—what happens when a group's attention locks onto one thing, together, until the individual experience fades away and a sense of belonging or Loving Awareness emerges. Émile Durkheim, who coined the term, didn't find it on a stage. He found it in religion. In ritual. In congregations facing the same direction, saying the same words, until something larger than any single person in the room seemed to fill it.

Which is the quiet thing theater has always been. A roomful of strangers, facing the same direction, agreeing to believe the same impossible thing for two hours. Take the room away and theater stops being theater. The faith has nowhere to land.

The Country

Most other consumption runs on the opposite premise. The internet is built for asynchrony—watch what you want, when you want, alone if you want. Theater insists on the older bargain: we are all right here, right now.

The catch is you have to be there. And most of us, most of the time, aren't. We love this thing from our own shores, catching glimpses of each other's lighthouses, never quite able to see the others sailing out there. We're not unique in this. Every fandom, every devotion, is reaching for the same thing—some way to feel less alone in what it loves. We just happen to love the one art form that is built on being in a room together, and then spend most of our time apart.

Except one Sunday in June.

I was a post-producer for the 2022 Tony Awards, and I can tell you Radio City runs on the exact same mechanism as any black box with forty folding chairs. Same entrainment. Same held breath. The only difference is what's around it.

The performers know they're being watched by millions of other rooms. The audience in the seats knows their experience is being shared, in real time, by every theater person who tuned in. And the reverse holds: from the apartments and the watch parties and the dorm rooms and the silent TVs, you know there's a room full of your people at Radio City. You're watching what your high school theater teacher is watching. What the casting director who passed on you last week is watching. What your Mom (or at least my Mom) is watching.

For three hours, the room that normally fits in a building grows to the size of the country. The faith gets its room.

The winners and gowns and cameras and tuxes are decorations. The thing underneath—the reason it makes a kid at a Culver's cry—is that for one night, the whole scattered congregation is in one place, facing the same direction.

The Church

Here's the problem: that Church of Radio City doesn't have enough pews for everyone.

So this year, we built some.

It's called Antoinette—an unofficial Tony pool on theater.games. You pick the winners. You do it with your people: a pool you start, or one you join. Next Sunday when the big show starts, the picks lock, and as each envelope opens you watch your guesses come true or not—together, in real time. If you've ever filled out a March Madness bracket (which I have not), you know the shape of it. Except the categories are Best Lighting Design in a Play and Best Original Score. And the people you're up against cry at key changes. (My people!!)

And somewhere out there, a stranger you'll never meet is doing the exact same thing with other people you'll never meet. You can't see them. But you know they're there. Picking too.

It is, I'll admit, a strange little act of faith. A scorecard is not a sacrament. But it does the one thing the silent TV never could: it gives the night a shape you can hold in your hand. A reason to gather. A direction to face. The same sacred texts—Best Whatever in a Whatever by a Whatever—read aloud at the same hour, in living rooms that will never know what's hanging on each other's walls.

The pool was never about being right. It's about not being alone in front of the screen.

One Sunday in June

The kid at the corner table took the whole thing on faith. He believed his people were out there, squinting at their own screens, even though he couldn't actually see a single one of them.

Once a year, he's proven right.

So pull up a chair. Start a pool, or join one. Fill in your picks. Get them gloriously wrong. It doesn't matter, really. But it does mean that next Sunday, when the Church doors open and the room becomes the country, you'll have a seat in it.

The faithful have always needed somewhere to gather. Next Sunday, mine's a silly little scorecard.

There's a chair next to me, if you want it.

This week in One Last Thing: Where my faith that "my people are out there" actually came from. Turns out it wasn't theater.

It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which keeps The Fourth Wall independent and alive. Either way, I'm truly grateful you're here.

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Here's a not-hot take: part of what makes theater magical is that each performance only happens once.

I've written about it (a lot) but I'd be lying if I said I always felt it.

Yet there are some shows, some pieces, that make that feeling almost inevitable. Unavoidable.

Enter The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. A twenty-year-old musical that's been done in almost every high school in America. It would be sane to think that a show that's been produced that much would feel dusty or stale or just plain predictable.

But sitting in the audience in New World Stages, where the latest revival of Spelling Bee is currently running, I felt that good-good theater magic.

So what is it about this quirky little musical that triggered it? That's what I want to sit with this week—what happens to a room of strangers when a show makes its own unrepeatability impossible to ignore.

O-n-w-a-r-d.

The Beginning

This isn't my first Bee.

I had the cast album of Spelling Bee before I ever saw the show. I knew every word back and forth. I loved it the way you love a thing you've only heard. Completely, and from a distance.

Then the sit-down production came to the Drury Lane in downtown Chicago, and I finally saw it on its feet. I was thirteen. I had never experienced anything like it—I loved it instantly, helplessly, and I had no idea how to say why.

I bought a red ringer tee in the lobby and wore it for years, through high school and most of college. It is still one of the only pieces of show merch I have ever actually worn.

And the thing I wanted, more than almost anything? To be one of the three people pulled out of the audience to spell.

The Bystanders

The premise, if you've never seen it: Spelling Bee is a musical about a middle school spelling bee—and three of the spellers are real people, pulled from the audience. Not actors. Not plants. Three strangers who, a few minutes earlier, were looking for their seats. Bystanders turned spellers.

They go up onstage, they're given real words, and they have to spell them. For real. Nobody knows exactly what will happen—not you, not the three of them, not even the cast.

Yes—the company has its bits ready. But the raw material is new every night—they're improvising around three people who have never done this and never will again.

It would be easy to file that under "audience participation." But that misses what's unusual. Plenty of shows acknowledge they're live—an ad-lib about the weather, a performer naming the city.

In Spelling Bee: the unpredictability is baked into the foundation of the show. Take the three strangers out and it's not (really) Spelling Bee.

The Body

Your brain, more than anything, is a prediction machine—every moment guessing what comes next, spending its attention on how wrong each guess turns out to be. Neuroscientists call that gap prediction error. It's the currency of attention.

A locked show is a low-error environment. Not an insult—it can still wreck you. But it does what it was built to do, the way it was built to do it. Your brain, sensing no surprises, settles slightly. And the once-ness drifts back into the abstract. You know it. But you don't necessarily feel it.

The three strangers make settling impossible. They flood the room with real prediction error—three people whose next syllable or step can't be guessed by anyone, themselves included. Your brain fires. You lean forward. You have no choice.

That's the conversion. The once-ness was always true. The strangers are what make your body believe it.

The Break

Now I have to be honest, because there's an obvious objection and it's a good one.

The audience spellers are, mostly, a comedy bit—funny and loose and human, and then, fairly quickly, gone. The part of Spelling Bee that breaks you isn't them. For me, it's "The I Love You Song." Every single time. That's the thing that breaks me. And that song happens (and hits) in the same spot every night.

So if I told you the strangers are THE reason the show lands, I'd be overselling them. They aren't the heart. The heart was written and rehearsed and locked.

But they do something the scripted heart can't do for itself. They calibrate the room—they spend the first stretch teaching your nervous system that tonight is unsettled, genuinely unrepeatable. And once your body believes that, it doesn't stop believing it when the volunteers sit back down.

You carry that alertness into every moment after. By the time Olive sings, you're watching a locked, word-for-word number with the attention three amateurs installed in you an hour earlier. That's how a show that's ninety percent fixed can still feel, all the way through, like it's happening just once.

Because it is.

The Bee-ing

Spelling Bee is one of the most-produced musicals in America—running in high schools and community theaters probably within twenty miles of wherever you're reading this. By any measure, the opposite of rare.

And it's also one of the least repeatable things ever built for a stage. No two performances can be the same—not at New World Stages, not in any cafeteria in Ohio—because three of the people in every one have never done it before and (probably) never will again.

So the preciousness I felt was never about scarcity. It's something else: the instance can't be duplicated. This room. These three strangers. This night, this arrangement of people who will never be gathered again.

To be clear: that was always true. Of Spelling Bee, and of the longest-running show on Broadway grinding out on a Tuesday night. The once-ness was never Spelling Bee's invention. The show just built a room where I couldn't look away from it.

So I don't know what to do with the obvious next question—whether every show should reach for this. Maybe not. Maybe the feeling depends on being rare—maybe you only get a handful of nights, ever, where the wallpaper peels and you feel the thing you always technically knew.

Maybe that's the deal. You don't get to feel it all the time.

You just have to be there. Or, in this case, bee there.

This week in One Last Thing: what happened when I went to the Drama Desk Awards on Sunday—and why this whole piece felt different to write afterward.

It's for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, I'm grateful you're here.

One last thing…

Sunday night, I officially became a Drama Desk Loser—a phrase I have gotten an unreasonable amount of joy out of saying this week.

But if I'm honest: it genuinely did not matter. What happened, for me, on Sunday had nothing to do with what was in that envelope.

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On a Tuesday in April, I found out that our show, BEAU, had been nominated for a Drama Desk Award. Ten nominations in total—tied for the most of any production this season.

I know what that sentence is supposed to do. I know the gracious-losing language that follows it: it’s an honor just to be nominated. I’ve heard it and quietly filed it under polite nothings. We all decided, somewhere along the way, that it’s what you say before the real winner gets announced.

But something about that Tuesday morning made me want to sit with the phrase instead of letting it pass. Because I think it’s pointing at something real—something most of us experience but don’t have great language for. And I think it has everything to do with a distinction we almost never make.

We are, collectively, pretty suspicious of external validation.

The self-help canon is unanimous: don’t need it. Build your interior. Know your worth independent of outcome, recognition, or applause. We’ve turned “I don’t need external validation” into a kind of emotional maturity badge. And there’s real wisdom in that. There’s a version of external validation that functions like addiction—the reach for proof that you’re enough, the relief that arrives and almost immediately dissolves, leaving you searching for the next hit. Anyone who’s refreshed their phone after posting something knows exactly what that feels like.

But here’s what the conventional wisdom misses: it treats external validation as a single thing. One experience with one function.

It isn’t.

There are two fundamentally different things that can happen when the outside world responds to your work. The first is the one we’re warned about—validation that fills a hole. You weren’t sure the work was good. You weren’t sure you were good. The recognition arrives and answers the question, at least temporarily. It tells you something you didn’t already know.

The second is different. It’s validation that confirms something already true. The belief was already there. The pride was solid before anyone else weighed in. The recognition doesn’t fill anything—it meets something. Agrees with something. Reflects back something you were already carrying.

These feel nothing alike in the body. The first feels like relief. The second feels like something I’ve been trying to find the right word for since nominations were announced—somewhere between overwhelming and surreal. Not because you’re surprised by the confirmation. Because you’ve been holding the belief alone long enough that anyone agreeing feels like you’ve suddenly got company.

This doesn’t happen automatically. You don’t arrive at the confirmation kind of validation without first doing something harder: holding belief in your work privately, without evidence, through the stretches when the evidence isn’t coming and the world isn’t paying attention.

BEAU closed for the second time in January. Two runs off-Broadway, each demanding in ways I didn’t fully anticipate—physically, emotionally, in every direction. When it ended, I didn’t have a clean takeaway. Some experiences leave you with more texture than certainty. The world moved on quickly, the way it does. The conversations stopped. Nobody was talking about the show anymore.

But the belief didn’t close with it. We kept carrying the pride in what we made, the conviction that it was worth making, the knowledge of what every single person in that building gave to a little show that many people still have never heard of. That kind of faith doesn’t ask for evidence. It doesn’t negotiate. It just holds.

That private period—the stretch of carrying belief without confirmation—is exactly what makes the second kind of validation possible. You can’t have the alignment without first having the interior. The outside can only meet something that’s already there.

But even when the belief is solid—independent, not in need of anyone’s agreement—something still shifts when the outside finally confirms it. Not your conviction. Not your confidence in the work. Something subtler.

Maybe it’s that we can’t fully hold something true in total isolation. Maybe belief, at some level, wants to be witnessed. Not to exist. Not to be real. But to become fully inhabitable. To be something you can stand inside of, rather than just carry.

When the nominations came out and the names of the people who made our show got called—the lighting and the sound and the direction and the words and the music—I didn’t feel vindicated. I didn’t feel like I’d finally been proven right. I felt, strangely, less alone in something I’d already known.

That’s the thing the conventional wisdom about external validation can’t account for. The version it warns you about is real. But so is this other version—the one that doesn’t create belief, only meets it.

Maybe that’s what makes the phrase worth saving. Not “it’s an honor to be nominated” as consolation prize language. But honor in the older sense—acknowledgment that arrives not as charity but as recognition. The difference between being seen and being noticed. Between a handshake and a pat on the head.

So yes. I do think it is, in fact, truly (and literally) an honor just to be nominated.

See you next week ♥️
—Matt

Tony nominations were announced on Tuesday morning.

By afternoon, the feeds had been hurricaned.

Reaction videos. Graphics. FaceTime clips. Snub recaps. Nominee spotlights. Congratulations carousels. All of it arriving in a flood so dense and fast that by noon, if you’d been following even a handful of Broadway accounts, you’d have consumed more theater content in three hours than most people encounter in six months.

Let’s call all of it Turnaround: content that requires prep—pre-design, scheduling, coordination—and is speedily dispatched to be as timely as possible and maximize reach. In theory.

Turnaround has become the new benchmark for “doing social media right” in the Broadway-sphere. And I don’t say that dismissively. It might actually be right.

But something about this year’s nomination morning made me want to pull on the thread. To look at not just what the machine is doing, but what it’s doing *to us*.

Let’s get into it.

The Flood

First: this isn’t a Broadway thing. It’s an everything thing.

In every corner of entertainment—sports, film, television, music—there is a brand or a channel or an outlet or a person hoping to be the first to take a bite out of whatever cultural cake is being served that hour. The machinery of timely content is not our invention. We are, after all, an industry that still measures success in part by what critics write in newspapers, which is...charming.

But this year confirmed something: most shows, outlets, and agencies have figured out how to get the content machine up and running.

And the machine has specific goals. Producers want attention. Relevance. Heat. The perception that their show is the thing everyone is talking about right now. That desire—especially in awards season, especially on nomination morning—manifests as a need for speed. And so agencies and social teams and graphic designers and video editors go vroom vroom.

Toot toot beep beep.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. I want to be clear about that. Speed serves a real purpose. The wave when a nomination is new news is short-lived. You catch it or you don’t. The reality is that the campaign starts the moment nominations are announced—voters need to be reached. The case for your show needs to be made while people are listening. I get the logic entirely.

But also, those nominees are real, human, people.

The Morning

This year’s nominees, some of whom are dear friends, were fielding calls as soon as the nomination livestream ended. From outlets wanting quotes. From social teams wanting video. From publicists coordinating next steps. All of it real, all of it legitimate, all of it part of the machinery that exists to amplify this kind of news while it’s still news.

And as I scrolled, I just kept thinking: *I wonder if they’ve had a chance to call their people yet.*

Not their team. Their people. The ones who knew them before any of this. The parent who drove them to rehearsal until they could drive themselves. The friend who talked them out of quitting when it felt like “what’s the point?” The person they went home to after they bombed that callback.

Because what I was watching—and what I think Turnaround, at its most compressed, actually does—is collapse the distance between the moment and the performance of the moment. Between finding out and telling everyone you found out. Between the feeling and the feed.

The Distance

That distance is the space where something metabolizes and becomes yours. The subway ride home after the show. The quiet morning after an opening. The cab ride where you sit in silence (and mute the TV in the taxi). Those pauses, those gaps, are where meaning starts to assemble itself.

When you hand the moment to the machine before it’s had time to become yours, something gets lost. Not the joy. The joy is still real. But the private ownership of the joy. The experience of *knowing* something before it becomes a story about knowing it.

I’m not making a case for logging off. I don’t believe in that as a prescription, and I’m suspicious of anyone who offers it as one. Sharing is not inherently corrosive. Connection is the whole point.

The case I’m making is smaller than that. Just: protect the gap. Even a small one.

The Reach

The machine is optimizing for reach. That’s its job. Reach the voters. Reach the press. Reach the ticket buyers. Do it fast, strike while the iron is hot.

Admittedly, it’s very good at its job. The content that went out on nomination morning was slick, warm, fast, human. Some of it was genuinely smart and beautiful! You can feel the real care that went into it.

But reach and resonance are not the same thing. And the speed that maximizes one can quietly undermine the other.

When everything arrives at once—every show, every nominee, every reaction, every graphic—the sheer volume starts to flatten it. Individual moments blur into a stream of content. The specific person at the center of each of those nominated projects—the one who has been working toward this for years, whose life is genuinely different today than it was yesterday—gets a little harder to see.

But it doesn’t stop with awards season. This is what happens when the distance collapses everywhere, for everyone, all the time. When the instinct to share a moment arrives before the moment itself has had time to register. When the proof of the experience starts to feel more urgent than experiencing the experience.

That’s not a Broadway problem. It’s just where we are.

Turn Around

The people at the center of those nomination-morning graphics—the ones the machine is amplifying—didn’t just wake up that Tuesday and have a thing happen to them. They got there. Years of it. Callbacks they didn’t book. Contracts that were a mess. Roles that went to someone else. Late nights in rehearsal rooms, early mornings at day jobs, the long slow accumulation of trying and trying and trying until one Tuesday morning, a livestream says your name.

That road is the whole story. And nobody sees it in the graphic.

Which is why I think what the moment actually deserves—before the quote, before the video, before the notification hits—is for you to *turn around*. Literally, almost. To face the direction you came from. To see the road that got you there, and all the people who were on it with you, before you start thinking about what comes next or how to share it or what the caption should be.

The machine is already pointed forward. It’s already thinking about reach and timing and what this does for the campaign. That’s its job and it does it well.

But you don’t have to be pointed forward yet. You’ve been pointing forward for years. Just—for a minute—turn around.

That moment, the private one, the one where you actually see and feel what happened to you before it becomes a story about what happened to you—that one only comes once.

And it belongs to you. First.

This week in One last thing: the Tuesday morning I found out I’d been nominated for a Drama Desk Award—and the graphic that was already live before I’d talked to my parents. It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Regardless, thank you for being here.

One last thing…

I found out about the Drama Desk nomination when I opened my eyes last Tuesday morning and Sam said, “you got nominated for a Drama Desk.”

Unbeknownst to sleeping me, my phone had been blowing up with texts from friends and family. And on Instagram—there was a graphic. A few, actually. And when I saw them for the first time, my stomach dropped.

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Megan Thee Stallion is leaving Moulin Rouge! two weeks early. She collapsed in her first week of the run—diagnosed with extreme exhaustion, dehydration, vasoconstriction, and low metabolic levels. Depending on which corner of the internet you’re on, there’s also a breakup.

We don’t know her whole truth. We may never. She hasn’t said much beyond I’ve been pushing myself past my limits, running on empty, and my body finally said enough. Speculation is pointless, so I won’t do it here.

But that sentiment—of pushing past limits and running on empty—is something every performer recognizes in their body-ody-odys.

Whether you slept last night, whether you ate this afternoon, whether the person you love just left, whether you got the call you were dreading on the way to half-hour—you’ve got a show to do. Eight times a week.

The conventional response to all of that is admiration. What stamina! What skill! What a talent! And those words aren’t wrong. But they’re also a kind of cover. They make the toll legible only as virtuosity. They turn the cost into a compliment.

The general public, I think, doesn’t quite believe how much working in theater asks of a body. They might intellectually concede it. But they don’t feel it. And the not-feeling is part of why the conditions of the work don’t change.

That’s what I want to sit with. The illusion. What it asks. What it costs. What we don’t talk about because we are so good, by training, by reflex, by contract, at making hard things look easy.

Shall we?

The 8x

A performer’s body is an instrument doing repetitive precision work for hours, eight times a week. That’s the most boring possible way to say it, and it’s the most useful, because it’s the part people most reliably forget.

Researchers at NYU have started measuring vocal output the way a Fitbit measures steps. They put dosimeters on Broadway-bound singers and watch the data come back—duration of phonation, pitch, intensity, the literal accumulated vibrations of folds against folds. It’s the most rigorous look anyone has taken at what a contemporary theater role actually demands.

And the data, so far, says…drumroll…we don’t know. We can measure the impact. But we cannot tell you where the line is. The researchers have been honest—the threshold of “how much is too much” hasn’t been defined, especially with little to no vocal rest in between eight shows a week.

That admission is more meaningful than it might sound. It means an entire profession is operating without a known threshold of safety. Performers go out there every night doing something that we cannot (in any objective sense) prove the body can sustain. And we’re collecting evidence in real time, on the bodies themselves.

The ultimate toll isn’t an injury. It’s the steady wear of a thousand small things. The big dance number every night for a year. The vocal placement that keeps you from blowing out at the top of act two but slowly tightens something in the back of your jaw. The understudy you don’t trust, so you go on with the cold. The stretch you did before the show that pulled something wrong.

The eight times. The eight times. The eight times.

By the time the body says enough, it’s already been saying it for a while. The call-out is just the part the public sees.

The Score

Here’s where the instrument metaphor breaks down. An instrument can be put away. A cello doesn’t have to keep being a cello between performances. A body does.

A performer’s body is also their emotional body. The same nervous system that has to belt the high note at 8:44pm is the nervous system that absorbed the news from the doctor’s office at 8:44am. The same diaphragm that supports the long phrase is the diaphragm that’s been clenched all afternoon because of that conversation you need to have. There is no offstage version of your body you get to leave in the dressing room. You bring it all.

And theater asks you to do something specific with that: to take whatever the day gave you and metabolize it into the work. Channel it somehow. Let it become the texture of what you’re doing on stage.

This is the part the audience most reliably underestimates because they don’t have to think about it. They paid for the show. They came to see the show. They have no obligation to wonder what the person on stage is carrying.

But the person is carrying something. And the body is the thing carrying it.

And even when the day was too heavy, or the loss was too fresh, or the body just doesn’t have it—you might still go on anyway. You go on, and you do the work as well as you can, and the audience probably never knows.

The clinical version of what this does over time isn’t surprising. Chronic anxiety. Perfectionism. Burnout. A body that stops finding rest restorative. A nervous system that lives, low-grade, in the ready position for so long it forgets what neutral feels like. The mental health research on performers is consistent enough that it’s almost boring to cite. The data confirms what the bodies were already saying.

The body keeps the score. Eventually, the body files the report.

The Reflex

The illusion is the product. The high note sounds inevitable. The choreography looks natural. The grief in the second-act ballad is fresh, even on a Sunday matinee, even when you did it last night, even when you’ve done it 312 times. Performers and directors and creative teams work in concert to make the labor disappear. The seam is the enemy. Hiding it is the job. For some.

For others, like the guys in Mexodus, the visibility of their process is part of the art. They wear the construction proudly. They refuse to hide the making—and it becomes a different kind of magic.

But what nobody mentions about the version that hides it is that the hiding doesn’t stay in the theater. You train yourself, over months and years, to hold your truth at a very specific distance. Far enough away that it doesn’t get in the way of the work. Close enough that it can inform and inspire and ignite something unique every night. That’s the calibration. That’s the craft. And it works—until the calibration becomes a reflex, and the reflex becomes a habit, and the habit follows you home.

The self-concealment that protects the performance starts to govern everything else. The internal barometer that tells you this is too much, this is not okay, I am not okay—it gets drowned out. Not because you’re broken. Because you got very, very good at not letting it interfere with the task at hand.

You lose touch with your own signal. The instrument that was supposed to feel everything has learned, through repetition, to keep feeling things at a precise and managed distance.

That’s the cost the audience never sees. Not just the physical toll. The quiet erosion of the thing underneath the performance—the sense of self that was supposed to be the source of all of it.

The Acknowledgment

I don’t have a fix. I want to say that out loud because I think the absence of a fix is part of why this conversation rarely happens. The economics of Broadway require eight shows a week to break even. Every honest version of the conversation about reducing the schedule ends in the same place: who pays for it. The producers can’t, the unions know it, the audience doesn’t want ticket prices any higher than they already are. The math doesn’t math.

So this isn’t a piece arguing for a six-show week. It’s not even a piece arguing for anything in particular. It’s me trying, mostly, to say a thing out loud.

The precondition for anything ever changing is that the audience—the public, the press, the casual fan, the producer, the politician—actually believes that the work is hard. Not as a compliment. As a fact.

I’m aware that you, reading this, may already know all of this. Many of you live it. I’m not telling you anything you haven’t been carrying yourself.

But maybe a few people who don’t live it will read this, and the next time they see a performer make an impossibly hard thing look easy, they’ll let themselves register that the easy is the achievement, and the hard is the truth.

That’s all this is. Not a solution or a demand or a manifesto. Just a small, stubborn refusal to call the cost a compliment.

For paid subscribers this week: a memory from deep in the BEAU run that got me thinking about bodies, hiding and all that sappy jazz. ($5/month, which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, thank you for being here.)

One last thing…

There’s a scene towards the end of (10-time-Drama-Desk-nominated) BEAU that I’d been doing a version of for close to a decade. It involves tears and heaves and hugs and one night in December, between sobs, a thought arrived.

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There’s a conversation I’ve had hundreds of times with friends in this industry. People who’ve left it. People thinking about leaving. It almost always has the same shape.

Someone says they’re done, or close to done, or need a break—but they don’t mean theater.

They mean the business of theater. The auditions. The economics. The politics of who gets in the room and who doesn’t. The particular way the industry can make you feel like a fool for caring as much as you do. That’s what they need distance from.

The form itself—the thing that got them here, that woke something up in them when they were four or fourteen or twenty-four or forty—that’s usually still there. Still working. Still doing the thing it did at the start.

Understandably, we sometimes call both of these things Broadway. And I think that conflation is the source of more quiet grief than we like to stop to acknowledge.

That gap is what I want to sit with here. Not to argue that the business doesn’t matter—it does, enormously—but to try to say something more precise about what we’re actually talking about when we talk about loving this thing. And what we risk losing when we let the two get confused.

Here we go.

Show & Business

The reason show and business get tangled is not complicated.

The form always arrives first. Years before you have any relationship with the industry—before auditions, before contracts, before bank accounts—the form wakes something up in you.

Then the business comes later, slowly, through the form itself. We start to see the mechanics and systems and structures that make up the thing that, at one point, felt like magic.

Over time, you stop being able to sense where one ends and the other begins. The reality of the business starts attaching itself to your experience of the art. The frustrations of one start masking as frustrations with the other. Which is understandable—if not inevitable.

And it is also, I think, a mistake worth naming.

Theater Magic

Theater doesn’t just do one thing to a brain. It stacks.

Think about what’s happening from the moment you walk into a theater. There’s the ritual—waiting in line, scanning the ticket, finding the seat, the program in your hand, the low hum of the room. There’s the gathering—a crowd of strangers, physically together, oriented toward the same thing. There’s the sensory environment—the temperature, the smell, the way a curtain looks under pre-show light.

There’s the music, which does something to the nervous system that language alone cannot. There’s the language, which does something to your nervous system that music alone cannot. There’s the lights, and the sets, and the proscenium. And there’s bodies. Doing something vulnerable—performing, feeling, allowing themselves to be seen.

Any one of these things alone could move you. Stacked on top of each other, they produce something specific. I’ve written about collective effervescence—the charge of being emotionally synchronized with a group.

What I want to name here is simpler: the conditions that produce it are not accidental. They are built into the form. Every single element—the ritual, the gathering, the music, the language, the bodies, the dark before anything begins—is particular to the form of live theater.

Not to the business of it. The form.

The Distance

Sometimes, and I think this is important to say, you do need distance from the form. So that you can expand your taste, your worldview, your experiences. So that you can follow your curiosity instead of feeling boxed in by slime tutorials and cast recordings.

And sometimes you need distance from the business too. Not because you’ve fallen out of love with musicals, but because the business is genuinely hard.

Both of those distances are legitimate. But they are not the same.

Protecting yourself from the machine doesn’t need to cost you the form. The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. That’s a decision you make internally, whether you know it or not.

Your relationship to the industry can get complicated, can need tending, can require you to walk away for a while. That’s fine. That’s honest.

But the form can still be yours. It can still comfort, or tickle, or ignite something in you like nothing else can—whenever you need it.

You’ve Got a Friend

The nice thing about theater, regardless of what you might’ve heard, is that it’s not going anywhere.

The form is a lifelong friend.

SPIKE has proven it. It’s a daily puzzle game for theater people that’s been played almost 20,000 times since it launched 14 days ago.

People from every side, every “level”, every nook and cranny of the industry—from middle school geeks and stage moms, to college professors and seasoned queens—are playing. Some as a solo daily joy ritual, and some in group texts and high school classes and Broadway casts.

There is a shared affection for the form that has shined through, for me, in a new way in the last two weeks. I can see, from the admin dashboard and the daily SPIKE results texts, that the Love hasn’t faded. Maybe it’s been shaded. Hidden behind worthy frustration and deserved disillusion. But it’s there.

The business will keep being what it is—messy, expensive, worth fighting for. But it was almost never the thing that hooked us. Or held us. Or swept us away. Or saved us.

No matter how far you wander or how long you drift, when you’re ready, you can always come back home.

To the theater.

This week in One Last Thing: on what building SPIKE taught me about why I got into theater in the first place—and a gift for paid subscribers. It’s $5/month (or $50/year), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, thank you for being here.

One last thing…

I was a math kid.

Not the prodigy kind. The kind who found algebra class more comfortable than English class—where a problem had a right answer, and the process of getting there was creative in its own way.

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Every "professional" theatre person—every understudy, every swing, every dresser, every stage manager, every casting director, every Tony winner—came from a different-kind-of-same place.

A small auditorium on a Saturday night. And that's not a metaphor.

It's a song from All the World's a Stage. And literally your cousin's backyard. Your temple's basement. Your middle school cafetorium with the basketball nets cranked up to the ceiling.

The thing we call the industry—the thing with the Playbill and the reviews and the Tonys and the cast recordings and the TikToks—doesn't exist without those rooms. Not "is harder without them." Doesn't exist.

We talk about Broadway as the apex. Regional as the farm system. Community theater as a hobby. The conversation runs top-down, from marquee back to middle school.

But maybe the river starts in the small auditorium. The marquee is just the mouth—wider, louder, visible from further away. But the water is coming from somewhere else.

This week, let's go there.

Amateur Hour

Broadway isn't, by and large, a room full of amateurs.

But the thing Broadway pays millions of dollars to re-create—the electricity, the ensemble Love, the feeling that the show matters, that something is at stake for everyone in the room—is sitting in a high school auditorium with a broken AC. Unglamorous. Uncommodified. "Amateur."

Turns out, the word amateur comes from the Latin amare. It means one who Loves.

So when someone says "it's just community theater," what they're literally saying is: "it's just a room full of people who Love this."

That's a strange label to use as a downgrade.

Broadway, by contrast, is a room full of professionals—which is its own beautiful, hard-won, worthy thing. But professional means "one who is paid." Which means, necessarily, that some of the Love has to get re-routed through the market. Through the agent. The contract. The rent. Nobody's fault. Just the math of having to eat.

The small auditorium on Saturday night doesn't have a market to route through. Which means what's happening in that room is, technically, the purest version of the thing.

The industry's job, at its best, isn't to transcend that. It's to stay close to it. To remember where the water came from.

Downstream

It's easy, downstream, to step in the water and forget it has an origin.

We tend to do that to ourselves too.

The brain is not an archive. Memories aren't filed away like photographs—they're rebuilt each time you need them. From fragments. Stitched together with whoever you are now.

Neuroscientists call this reconsolidation. Every recall alters the memory. The original fades. What remains is the most recent telling.

Which means the kid who first sat in a theater, breath held, watching something come alive—that kid isn't preserved. That kid is rebuilt, each time, by whoever you've become. Through whatever distance you're willing to travel.

And the distance is the whole thing.

Because if you could remember clearly—if you could get back down into the same body, the same torn fabric seats, the same held breath—you'd realize you were standing in the same water.

The upgrade isn't a fact about your life. It's a feeling produced by the distance between you and the version of your life that you "remember."

The further we edit ourselves from our own origin, the more upgraded we get to feel.

That's what the forgetting is for.

Upstream

Which is why, when we're suddenly reminded what's upstream, it hits different.

Quick story: last week I woke up to an Instagram notification that I'd been tagged in something.

It was a 30-second montage of quiet moments in a small, empty, local theater, moments before the audience arrived. "Saturday Night in a Small Auditorium," the opening number from All the World's a Stage, played underneath.

I wept. Nice tears! Like a door I didn't know was closed had cracked open.

Someone upstream—someone at the source—had picked up their phone and pulled me back in. They didn't know I'd drifted. I'd been downstream. I'd been in it. And what the reel said, unknowingly, was: you're still one of us. Come back whenever you want.

I'd forgotten I could.

Saturday Night

That song—"Saturday Night in a Small Auditorium"—is the opening track on All the World's a Stage, a new cast recording I'm on. It came out in May.

It’s not the first song chronologically (there's an overture that's gorgeously orchestrated by musical theater legend Michael Starobin.) It's the first song structurally.

Which is the same thing this whole essay has been trying to say.

Adam Gwon’s brilliant song, in it’s own way, says: whatever else this show is about, it's downstream of a specific kind of place. A kind of dust. A kind of rickety curtain. A kind of Love.

It's not a step on the ladder. It's a Love letter back to the source.

To every drama teacher who stayed late. Every parent who brought tech-week pizza. Every director mouthing every line from the wings. Every kid in a too-big costume. Every person in every small town running the lights from a folding table at the back of the gym on a Saturday night.

The rest of us didn't get here without you.

We just have a bad habit of forgetting.

This week in One last thing: how a daily puzzle game reunited me with my 13-year-old, theatre-obsessed, self.

It's for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, thank you for being here.

One last thing…

Since Spike launched last week, I've poured more hours into it than into most of the things that actually pay me. Writing clues. Researching trivia. Testing the interface against the smallest possible edge cases. Scheduling puzzles weeks ahead so I don't have to panic-write them at 11:47pm on a Tuesday.

Here's the thing I keep being surprised by:

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On every stage in the world tonight, there's little pieces of tape marking exactly where everything is supposed to go. The furniture, the props, the actor's position under a specific light.

Run over, ripped off, and occasionally ignored completely, it is the true unsung hero of the show part of show business.

It's called spike tape. And I named a game after it. But more on that in a minute.

The Agreement

Theater hides almost everything.

The crew wears black. The wings are dark. The orchestra pit is sunk. Lighting rigs are painted to disappear into the fly space above. Every piece of the apparatus that makes the magic possible is designed to vanish, so that what you experience as an audience member feels pure—effortless, seamless, inevitable.

And yet, spike tape somehow missed that memo. It slipped through. It’s not invisible; audiences can see it if they look. Most don’t. But it’s there—a small, quiet admission that the show is a system. That someone had to figure out where everything goes and mark it, so it can be found again.

Whether we see it or not, there’s spike tape everywhere. Not just on the floor—but in the work itself.

The Details

Shows have their own version of spike tape—small, overlooked details that trace how a show gets from A to Z. Information that’s always been there—we just don’t think to look for it.

Pippin—the original 1972 production—was the first Broadway show to use b-roll footage in a TV commercial. Before Fosse, theater advertising was still images and copy. He put actual performance on camera, cut it like a music video, and Broadway marketing was never the same.

A Chorus Line was the first Broadway show to use an electronic lighting board. Before that, people moved dimmers by hand.

Facts like these make a show feel bigger. Like knowing someone in a show you’re seeing, or understanding how a fly system works—your experience expands. Your appreciation for the work deepens.

And science, as it often does, can prove it.

The Chemistry

At coursed restaurants, chefs will often come to the table and tell you about each dish. Where the fish was from. Why they put those two things on the same plate. And the food, somehow, tastes more delicious. Why?

A 2008 study at Caltech put people in fMRI scanners and gave them identical glasses of wine—same wine, different price on the label. The brains of people who believed the wine cost more showed measurably more activity in the regions associated with pleasure. Same wine. Different experience. The knowledge changed the chemistry.

We have a deep desire to close the gap between what we know and what we want to know. And when we do learn something—when knowledge expands—not only is it satisfying, but our curiosity grows. We want more knowing.

Distance, and the closing of it, makes the heart grow fonder.

The Game

So. The game.

It's called Spike. It lives at theater.games/spike. Every day, a Broadway show is revealed through five clues. The goal is to guess the show before you run out of clues.

The design principle underneath it is earnest: every wrong guess teaches you something. The clues exist to deliver information as much as to test it. The game presents as a quiz. It's really a ploy to teach you something you didn't know about a show you love, or one you've never heard of.

Hopefully, every day, you leave with a little more appreciation for a little piece of our little multiverse.

The Kid

If I'm being honest, I built this for my 13-year-old self who obsessively listened to cast recordings and treated Playbills like Bibles.

His hunger for knowledge about theater was ravenous. The facts in Spike would've been like sharkbait to him. And I think they would've expanded his understanding of all the other people, parts, and pieces that make a show possible.

I love the name Spike and the philosophy behind it—but I also want to be honest that it's a daily puzzle for show people. It's meant to be fun and silly and ours.

Beyond Wordle, there are about 600 daily games floating around. Many of them are about sports, music, or film. It's about time theater staked its claim—so here it is.

Spike is live at theater.games/spike. With a new puzzle every single day.

Play it. And if you love it, tell someone. Games like these travel through TikToks, IG stories, group chats, and word of mouth.

Have fun!

This week in One Last Thing: Spike’s strange origin story and the paperclip that started it all.

It's for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, thanks for being here.

One Last Thing

About six weeks ago, I had a strange idea—and it was not a daily puzzle game.

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I have a bad habit of over-explaining what I think a show is going to be before I see it.

A year of hearing about Mexodus—from my friends who were producing it, in hallway conversations, in the slow accumulation of buzz that happens when a piece keeps getting extended—meant that by the time I sat down in the Daryl Roth a few weeks ago, I had already written the show in my head. I knew it was two-person. I knew about the live looping. I knew it had something to do with the Underground Railroad running south, into Mexico. I knew it had won Helen Hayes Awards. I knew Lin-Manuel Miranda had said something about it online.

I thought I knew what I was walking into.

And then they knocked on the door.

The Knock

Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson don't begin Mexodus by finding themselves already in a scene. They knock. They come in. And then they explain, directly to us, who they are and why they're here.

It's a disarmingly simple gesture. And it changes everything about what follows.

When a show breaks the fourth wall—when a performer turns and addresses the audience—we usually understand it as a technique. A stylistic choice. The actor briefly steps out of the fiction to acknowledge the room, and then steps back in. It's a wink. A rupture.

What Brian and Nygel do is different. They don't break the fourth wall. They never build it in the first place.

They walk in as themselves—two multi-instrumentalists, a Black man and a Brown man, who found a story they couldn't believe wasn't in any textbook—and they tell us that. Out loud. At the top of the show. Before anyone has been asked to believe anything, they account for their own presence. They say: here's who we are, here's what we found, here's what we're going to do.

The opening call-and-response goes something like this: Did you know this shit? We didn't know this shit. And then: Why? Cuz it wasn't allowed, it wasn't allowed…it wasn't spoken aloud. It's funny and raw and immediate. And in about thirty seconds it puts the audience and the performers on exactly the same footing—equally astonished, equally implicated, equally in on it.

What I felt when that happened—and I've been trying to find the right word for it—was relief.

Theater asks a lot of us. It asks us to believe. To suspend. To accept the terms. Usually those terms aren't stated—we're expected to understand them from context, to slip into the fiction and not ask questions. And most of the time, we do. But there's always a low-grade labor in that. A kind of vigilance.

The moment Brian and Nygel knocked on that door, the vigilance released. Because they were saying, in the clearest possible terms: we see you. We know you're here. We know what this is. We're all in this together.

That's not a technique. That's a consent agreement.

The Veil

When Brian or Nygel picks up an instrument and plays a phrase into the loop pedal, they're not just making music. They're making the process of making music visible. The loop cycles. Another phrase gets laid on top. Then another. The song builds in real time, in front of you, from nothing. You watch it become itself.

In conventional musical theater, this is the opposite of how it works. You hear the finished thing. The orchestra is in a pit, or the tracks are pre-recorded, or at the very least the entire arrangement has been set and rehearsed until every element is invisible. The magic depends on concealment. You can't know how the sausage gets made because the sausage—as far as you're concerned—appears already made.

Mexodus shows you every step.

And what I kept waiting for—the moment where that transparency would break the spell, would make the whole thing feel less rather than more—never came.

Instead, the more I could see the mechanics, the more I trusted the magic. Because the magic wasn't the finished product. The magic was the act of making it. Right there, in the room, with their hands and their voices and their instruments.

This is a genuine argument about what theater can be. Not a gimmick. Not a format innovation. A philosophical claim: that the veil isn't required. That you don't have to hide how something is made for it to move people. That maybe the making is the thing that might move people most.

Director David Mendizábal put it precisely: "Looping was a metaphor for the labor that both characters were doing. The act of looping and creating music together was a metaphor for these two men working together, building trust, building solidarity." The form isn't separate from the story. It is the story. Every loop Brian lays down, every phrase Nygel records and builds on—it's Henry and Carlos, learning to trust each other across a border, piece by piece.

South

The story Brian and Nygel tell is one that most of us—including me—were never taught.

Between five and ten thousand enslaved people escaped bondage not by going north, but by going south. Across Texas. Across the Rio Grande. Into Mexico, where in 1829, Vicente Guerrero—who was himself of African descent—had abolished slavery. Thirty-four years before Lincoln. Mexico refused to sign a fugitive slave treaty with the United States. The law was simple: any enslaved person who set foot on Mexican soil was legally free.

This is the Underground Railroad that Mexodus is about.

The show they built around it is extraordinary in the way it holds two narratives at once. There's the story of Henry, an escaped enslaved man, and Carlos, a Mexican war veteran and farmer—a Black man and a Brown man finding each other across a border and saving each other's lives. And then there's the story of Brian and Nygel: two guys who found this history and couldn't let it go, who used every skill and instrument and tool they had to make sure you heard it too.

The show never lets you forget that both stories are happening. The history and the telling of it are equally present. And that doubleness is part of what makes Mexodus unlike anything I've seen on a stage.

The Impossible

At one point, Nygel says: I don't think I'm their wildest dreams. Because where we're from, you don't get to dream like this.

Take a second with that.

The wildest dream is still a dream—still tethered to what's imaginable, what the mind can reach for from inside a particular life. What Nygel is describing is something past that. A life that couldn't have been dreamed. A stage, a story, a loop pedal, sold-out houses, Lortel nominations—none of it inside the frame of what was possible to hope for. And what he's saying—as himself, as a Black man on a stage in New York City, telling a story about the Underground Railroad through instruments he plays with his own hands—is that he’s in a space his ancestors couldn't have imagined.

It's one of the most precise articulations of intergenerational possibility I've ever heard.

And it's also, somehow, a description of the show itself.

The Argument

Theater is a conservative art form in a lot of ways—attached to its conventions, its hierarchies, its traditions. The proscenium arch isn't going anywhere. Orchestras in pits aren't going anywhere. The implicit agreement to maintain the fiction, to not look at the lights, to not acknowledge that there's a human being two rows in front of you staring at the same stage—that's not going anywhere.

But Mexodus makes an argument that I think will be hard to ignore for anyone who experiences it. Not that all shows need to be like this—they shouldn't. That concealment isn't a prerequisite for transcendence. That a show can tell you exactly what it is, every step of the way, and still take you somewhere you've never been.

The veil, it turns out, was optional.

What Brian and Nygel have built is a piece of theater that trusts its audience completely. Trusts them to hold complexity. Trusts them to be moved by what's real. Trusts them to find the magic not in the illusion but in the witnessing.

That trust is rare. And when you feel it—sitting in a room where two people knocked on a door and told you exactly what they were going to do, and then did something so much bigger than they promised—it feels a little like what Nygel was describing.

It feels impossible. Made possible.

This week in One Last Thing: what it means to watch a show about crossing a border when you’ve just crossed one yourself.

It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, I’m grateful you’re here.

One last thing…

We (my husband and I) just moved to Los Angeles.

I’ve been sitting with that, trying to figure out what it means. Not logistically—logistically it means boxes and forwarding addresses and learning which freeways to avoid. I mean what it means about who I am now. What you leave behind when you leave a place. What you carry.

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Today I turn thirty-four. One week ago, I left New York.

I moved to the city at twenty-two. A one-way train from Boston. I landed at 53rd and 2nd—my first apartment, my first intersection, the first point on a map I didn’t know I was drawing.

Twelve years. That’s the distance between twenty-two and thirty-four. That’s also, it turns out, the distance between arriving somewhere and realizing it became part of you.

Sam and I are moving to Los Angeles. The reason is simple: Sam needs to be there for work. I’m his husband. We’re in this together. I want to say that plainly, because I think there’s a temptation to turn the move into something grander than it is. A reinvention. A statement. It’s not. It’s a marriage. It’s someone I love needing to be somewhere, and me going with him.

But the leaving part. The leaving part is something else entirely. Because it turns out that twelve years in a city doesn't just pass through you. It gets in.

This week, I wanted to understand why.

As I traipsed around the city over the past few weeks, knowing that we were on our way out, something strange started happening.

Block by block, it felt like a map was unfolding. That’s the bar where I kissed that boy. That’s the subway station staircase I cried under. That’s the pizza place on the east side where I ate dollar slices at 22 because it was all I could afford and I thought that was the dream—and I was right.

Every block has a timestamp. Every intersection holds something. And I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that living somewhere for twelve years could turn the streets into a kind of autobiography you don’t realize you’ve been writing.

In 1971, a neuroscientist named John O'Keefe discovered something in the hippocampus—the memory bank of the brain. He found neurons that fire only when you enter a specific location. He called them place cells. One neuron for the corner by your apartment. Another for the route to work. Another for the coffee shop. Your brain builds a spatial map of the places you inhabit. Not figuratively. Literally. Neuron by neuron, your brain draws the city inside itself.

There’s a famous study of longtime London taxi drivers. Brain scans showed their posterior hippocampus had physically grown over time. The city reshaped their brains. And the more years they drove, the bigger it got.

I am not a London taxi driver. But for twelve years, my brain has been drawing a map without asking permission. Every opening night. Every 3rd glass of wine. Every hug. Every heartbreak. Every subway ride home from every audition.

There’s another layer—harder to name—that has to do with how a place stops being where you are and starts being who you are. Psychologists call it place identity: the physical environments we inhabit become part of our self-concept. Not as backdrops. As structure. The place tells you: you are the person who lives here. It becomes evidence of your own existence.

And wherever we go, we pick up people the way roots pick up water—not by design, but by reaching toward whatever sustains us. We talk about “putting down roots” like it’s deliberate, like you plant yourself and grow. But roots don’t work that way. They’re opportunistic. They grow toward moisture. They find cracks and fill them. They tangle around whatever is solid enough to hold.

And New York accelerates this. Eight million people in three hundred square miles. You’re stacked on top of each other in apartments and subway cars and theater lobbies. You can’t avoid collision here. The density won’t let you. You meet your future collaborator because you were both waiting for the same bathroom at the same bar. Your friend of a friend of a friend becomes the friend who reshapes your thirties.

My people—the ones I had to hug goodbye—I knew almost none of them twelve years ago. They arrived through side doors. Through accidents. Through introductions that seemed meaningless at the time. That’s not a plan. That’s a root system. That’s what happens when you stay somewhere long enough.

Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?

Joni Mitchell was singing about parking lots. But the feeling she named—that something becomes most visible at the moment it disappears—turns out to be more than a lyric.

A psychiatrist named Mindy Fullilove studies what happens when people leave the places that shaped them. She found that when those bonds are disrupted—even voluntarily, even for the right reasons—the attachment doesn’t fade. It intensifies. The unfamiliarity of the new place makes the old one more vivid.

And if that’s true—the real weight of twelve years in this city will arrive after I’ve left it, when I’m three thousand miles away and some song comes on or some smell drifts past and my hippocampus fires up a block I haven’t walked in months and suddenly I’m back on 53rd and 2nd and it’s 2014 and I’m twenty-two and I don’t know anyone and everything is still starting.

The grief and the gratitude might be the same thing. The ache of leaving might be the first clear evidence that the place actually became part of you. You couldn’t feel the weight of the wall while you were leaning on it. You had to step away.

My impulse—my deep, almost cellular impulse—is to control what happens next. To arrive in LA with a framework. A plan for what the new chapter looks like, how I’ll stay connected, what I’ll build, where I’ll put my roots.

But I don’t think roots take instructions. They never did.

I’ve been asking myself all week why this birthday feels different. And I think the answer is that thirty-four, for me, isn’t a milestone. It’s a vantage point. It’s the first time I’ve been high enough to see the whole drawing—every line, every intersection, every mess that turned out to be a miracle.

Maybe that’s the thing about places and times. They become part of you so slowly that you don’t notice. And then you leave, and you notice all at once. And from that distance—from LA, from thirty-four, from the other side of a chapter you can finally read—you realize the question was never whether the city shaped you.

The question is what you do with the shape.

This week in One Last Thing: the thing I didn’t want to write about in this piece—what it means to leave the gravitational center of the thing I write about, and what I’m actually afraid of.

It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, thank you for being here.

One last thing…

There’s a version of this piece I didn’t write. The version where I talk about what it means to write a newsletter about theater—from inside the theater capital of the world—and then leave.

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Since then, the scope of this newsletter has expanded far beyond screens and feeds. But theater marketing remains one of the places my curiosity keeps returning to. Especially because, for all the attention social media gets, the industry still seems unsure how much power it’s actually willing to cede to it.

So when Katharine Quinn announced she was formally splitting her company into two distinct offerings—And That’s Showbiz, a Broadway media outlet, and And That’s Strategy, a boutique social media agency—my antennas went up.

It’s an unusual combination. One speaks directly to fans. The other advises producers. Taken together, it creates a vantage point that’s rare in this industry—one foot in the conversation shaping Broadway online, and one foot inside the rooms deciding how shows are sold.

I wanted to understand what drove the split. But more than that, I wanted to understand what the last few years of Broadway internet culture have actually changed about how shows are built, marketed, and sustained.

Let’s get into it.

The Accident

Matt: From the outside, the split felt very intentional. When did you realize this needed to become two separate companies?

Katharine: Honestly, none of it was planned.

And That’s Showbiz was always meant to be a Broadway digital media outlet. That was the original idea—red carpets, insider access, prestige content for Broadway. It wasn’t meant to be an agency.

Then Gatsby happened. I used And That’s Showbiz to start posting content for the show, and it became the strategy arm almost by accident.

At a certain point, two years in, I looked around and realized I had two different businesses living under one brand. Strategy is B2B—it’s advising producers and creative teams. Showbiz is B2C—it’s speaking directly to fans. Formalizing that felt necessary.

But it wasn’t just structural. I also wanted to make it very clear that And That’s Strategy is a team of brilliant minds. I wasn’t interested in this being the Katharine Quinn Show. These companies are made up of incredible people. So many times I get complimented on content that wasn’t my idea. The brilliant ideas and execution are being handled with great care by other people. I have a team of genuinely sharp talent, and I wanted the company structure to reflect that.

The Gap

Matt: On the Showbiz side—what gap were you seeing?

Katharine: I love prestige content. I grew up watching director’s cuts. I compulsively watch every Hollywood Reporter roundtable. Every Variety Actors on Actors.

And it felt like Broadway didn’t have much of that. We have news. We had ticketing sites. But not a lot of curatorial voice. Not a lot of opinion and editorial. Not a lot of deeper, long-form conversation about process.

There’s more of it now, and that’s exciting. The climate has shifted dramatically in the last two years. But at the time, it felt like there was space for something that wasn’t just transactional.

And part of that comes from how deeply I believe Broadway fandom is underestimated.

Broadway fandoms are essential to the core of our business. Even if you’re going to be a capitalist about it—it benefits everyone to listen to fans. They are online, telling you exactly what they’re responding to. They’re literally a focus group.

That belief—that fans are not peripheral to the business but central to it—kept surfacing throughout our conversation. It informs how Katharine thinks about both sides of her company. And it’s still, she told me, a harder sell than you’d think.

Matt: I feel like that belief informs both sides of what you do.

Katharine: It does. And it’s still a hard sell sometimes.

There’s a perception that fans aren’t average ticket price buyers and therefore somehow less valuable. I just don’t believe that. They are deeply invested. They come back. They bring people. They evangelize.

For example, people knew the New Money dance before they even came to see Gatsby. There is so much opportunity to build these brands online—and so much of it is still untapped.

If you don’t invest in community, your marketing is built on a house of cards. Fans are the core. They’re the magma, the core. Everything else builds out from there—influencers, press, celebrity, audience. But if you’re hollow at the center, the rest collapses.

That image stayed with me—fans as the molten core, the thing everything else builds out from, not the afterthought at the end of a marketing plan. In most rooms I’ve been in, the conversation starts with press, moves to celebrity, then to advertising. Community, if it comes up at all, is last. Katharine is arguing it should be the foundation.

But that only works if the data backs it up. So I asked her about the numbers.

The Funnel

Matt: What metrics is your team focused on—and is that different than what gets shared with producers?

Katharine: A huge part of our job now is education.

I have learned how to explain to producers of a certain age what a meme is. I’ve learned how to explain why it matters. I’ve learned how to explain that social isn’t just one person sitting in a corner on their phone.

When people ask if social sells tickets, I typically ask: how do you track billboard impressions? It’s an awareness tool. It’s part of a funnel. Social is the same—except it actually hits every part of the funnel. Awareness, reach, consideration, conversion. Organic social amplifies paid. You can click the link and purchase. Organic social creates press beats and highlights the ones that already exist. Social is quite literally the whole funnel.

On Gatsby, we’d see unexplained spikes in web traffic. And then we’d look at Instagram and see that a video had gone viral that day. Post-show surveys listed social as one of the top reasons people came.

Nobody questions a billboard buy, or a Times Square placement, despite the fact that measurement is essentially impossible. A full page Times ad in 2026 is a vanity buy. The impact of that forty thousand dollars would look very different coming from social.

Matt: When you talk about social hitting every part of the funnel—are you thinking more about brand building than selling tickets?

Katharine: The primary objective is to build the brand. Build the world of the show. Find the community and foster it. Let them know they are valued, that you’re listening.

Sometimes other parts of the marketing team need us to post something that looks like a paid ad on the feed, and that’s part of the job. But the primary work is world-building.

And I think if your marketing is only awareness and not community building, you’re ignoring 62% of your audience who don’t even live in the tri-state area. You’ve ignored everyone who isn’t physically walking past your billboard every day.

The Proof

Matt: If you zoom out—what feels structurally different about Broadway marketing now compared to even two years ago?

Katharine: When we started posting at volume on Gatsby, Broadway cadence was around two posts a week. Maybe. We were posting twice a day, six days a week, across six platforms. Seventy-two touch points a week. I did that for two years straight without missing a beat. And that doesn’t begin to touch the dozens of long-form videos we put on YouTube.

Nobody was doing that. I had an opportunity to demonstrate something—do a proof of concept, especially at Paper Mill. We got 75,000 followers during our out of town, which at that point was unheard of. Paper Mill gained 10,000 followers. Eva and Jeremy both gained thousands.

I had to make big swings like that because—who the hell was I? They literally called me “that TikTok girl.” And now we’ve built a reputation, which is incredibly fortunate. But so much of it was educating and explaining and proof of concept and gently taking people who aren’t familiar with these platforms by the hand and showing how powerful they can be.

Matt: And now? Has the rest of the industry caught up?

Katharine: Everyone understands social has to move faster now. But platforms are moving faster too. Producers are just now warming up to TikTok—as the platform is imploding. In a meeting last week, someone said investing in paid on TikTok is a great idea. We were having that conversation two and a half years ago. The industry is catching up, but platforms don’t wait.

What’s changed structurally is that social is no longer optional. It’s not experimental. At some point, every team realizes how important it is to their word of mouth, digital worldbuilding, reach, and longevity as a brand.

The Loop

One of the things that makes Katharine’s model unusual is that her two companies aren’t just separated—they can also work together. A strategy client might debut a piece of content through the Showbiz platform. And Strategy has taken a more content-forward, long-form approach than almost any other agency in the space—on Gatsby, they produced a creative team roundtable that runs an hour and a half. On Maybe Happy Ending, they took the writers back to NYU where they first met. It’s the kind of work that usually lives on the media side, not the agency side.

But the more interesting question is what flows the other direction.

Matt: Does running Showbiz actually change how you advise Strategy clients?

Katharine: Constantly. We’re watching fan sentiment in real time—what’s landing, what’s being ignored, what’s building organically. That intelligence feeds directly into how we build content strategy for shows. It’s a feedback loop.

Which brings up a question about positioning. Broadway marketing is increasingly being piecemealed out—influencer marketing here, organic social there, digital advertising somewhere else. Where does a boutique agency fit in that landscape?

Matt: What do you see as the value of a boutique agency versus a larger firm?

Katharine: I think there’s a place for everything. And the good news is, it’s now not uncommon for other agencies to welcome us in alongside them. They know our organic content performs, that it gets press pickup, that it feeds the rest of the funnel. The collaboration can truly be net positive for all parties partnering.

And I think there’s room for multiple agencies on a show. More creativity, more perspectives.

But I also think sometimes you want to go to the farmer’s market instead of Whole Foods. Everything we do is curated. We’re building a company culture around what we believe in and what differentiates us. And we’re selective because the work requires it.

Through talking to Katharine, it became clear to me that the split between Showbiz and Strategy wasn’t just a business decision. It’s a reflection of something that’s been changing in Broadway for a while now—the distance between the people who understand the audience and the people making decisions about how to reach them is shrinking.

For a long time, those were separate worlds. The conversation happening online among fans lived in one place. The rooms where marketing budgets were set and creative campaigns were built lived in another. And rarely did information flow cleanly between the two.

What Katharine has built—whether by design or by accident—is a company that sits at the intersection. And that intersection is, I think, where the most interesting questions about Broadway marketing live right now.

Not “does social sell tickets?”—but what happens to a show’s identity when the people shaping its online presence actually understand the audience they’re speaking to? What happens when fan intelligence isn’t an afterthought but a starting point? What changes when the person advising producers on strategy is also the person watching, in real time, what fans care about?

I don’t think we have full answers yet. But Katharine does have a sense of where things are headed:

The next phase is building the infrastructure to scale what we’ve proven works—without losing the quality that made it work in the first place.

She’s been right before.

This week in One Last Thing: intersections, Frankenstein's monster, and what it means to own the way you see the world.

It's for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Either way, I'm grateful you're here.

One last thing…

For most of my life, I wanted people to know what I could do. My voice. My set of skills. The question in every audition room or job interview was always some version of: how well can he do the thing?

There’s a clarity in that. And for a long time, I didn’t know I could want anything else.

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By now you’ve probably seen the clip. Timothée Chalamet, sitting across from Matthew McConaughey at UT Austin, making a case for why movies still matter—and in doing so, throwing ballet and opera under the bus. “I don’t wanna be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive,’ even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore.”

The internet did what the internet does. The ballet world clapped back. The opera world posted discount codes. Misty Copeland noted, with pointed calm, that Chalamet had personally asked her to help promote his film. SNL made a joke. A British opera singer called him “immature.” The cycle completed itself in about four days.

And all of it left me feeling icky. Not outrage. Something more like recognition.

The Shape of It

Here’s the thing nobody’s really saying about what Chalamet said: it wasn’t just careless. It was structural. He was doing what everyone in the performing arts does, constantly, automatically, often without realizing it. He found something below him on the ladder and used it to prop himself up.

There’s a ladder. We all know it. We just don’t talk about it out loud.

Film is at the top—or it was, until prestige television arrived and complicated things. Now it’s more like: an A24 film above an HBO drama above a network drama above a streaming procedural above the thing your uncle watches on Peacock. And below all of that, somewhere, is the franchise blockbuster, which makes a billion dollars and gets treated by “serious” film people as barely worth acknowledging.

Below film: theater. But not all theater equally. Drama at the top. The Pulitzer winner, the Sondheim revival, the new work from an important voice at a respected institution. Then musicals—but again, not equally. Original cast, the celebrity vehicle, the jukebox, the IP grab. And below that, somewhere: opera. Ballet. The forms Chalamet was dismissing.

Except the ladder doesn’t stop there.

How Low Can You Go?

Keep going and you find: regional theater. Community theater. The theater company operating out of a church basement. Theater for Young Audiences. Hairspray on Royal Caribbean. The performer doing eight shows a week in a theme park, in a costume, in August, in Orlando.

I have heard theater people—people I respect enormously, people who care deeply about this work—say things about these spaces that are functionally identical to what Timothée Chalamet said about opera. It’s not really professional. Nobody serious works there. It’s just for kids. It’s just for tourists.

No one cares about that anymore.

We say it all the time. We just don’t say it on a press tour for an Oscars contender, so nobody clips it.

The Mechanism

The ladder exists because it has to, I think. When you’ve given your life to something—when you’ve taken the financial hit, made the sacrifices—you need to believe it matters. You need to believe it matters more than some other thing. The hierarchy is a coping mechanism. A story we tell ourselves about why the hard choice was worth it.

This is one of the most human things there is. Watch it happen anywhere people choose conviction over comfort. The academic who spent a decade on a dissertation has opinions about the full time fanfic writer. The marathon runner has complicated feelings about the person doing a 5K who calls themselves a runner. The indie filmmaker has thoughts about Netflix. The mechanism is always the same: I gave up something real to be here. So here has to matter. And if here has to matter, then somewhere has to matter less.

For artists, the stakes feel especially high—because the sacrifice usually was. Nobody accidentally ends up doing eight shows a week in a regional theater. Nobody stumbles into a decade of dance training. These are choices made early, often at real cost. The hierarchy becomes the retroactive justification. It’s the story that makes the choice make sense. Which is why threatening it—even just by naming it—can feel like threatening the choice itself.

What We’re Actually Measuring

What are we measuring when we rank art forms? Ticket prices? Mass audience size? Cultural longevity? Critical prestige? Awards eligibility? The answer keeps changing depending on who’s doing the ranking and what they need to protect.

Film wants to be taken as seriously as theater. Theater wants to be taken as seriously as film. Opera wants to be taken as seriously as both. Musical theater wants to stop being the punchline. And everyone—quietly, constantly—is looking down.

Chalamet’s comment was clumsy and reductive. It revealed something about how he thinks about art that’s probably worth sitting with. But if the performing arts community’s response is just to say we matter too—and then go back to quietly dismissing the cruise ship performers and the TYA writers and the theme park dancers—then we haven’t learned anything.

We’ve just rearranged the ladder.

This week in One Last Thing: how this piece actually came together—what I kept saying when people asked me what I thought (aka why I couldn’t answer.)

It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep The Fourth Wall alive and independent. Regardless, thanks for being here.

One Last Thing

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Last Friday, I published a piece about a thirty-four-second rehearsal room clip from a community theatre in Witham, England. A guy singing “The Last Supper” from Jesus Christ Superstar. Filmed on an iPhone under fluorescent lights.

The next day, the video (which had crossed a million views in 48hrs) was gone.

No statement. No explanation. Maybe it was licensing. Maybe it was caution. Maybe it was something as simple as a clause that reads, somewhere in fine print, “no recording or distribution.” But the removal raised a bigger question for me:

What happens when the new geography of attention collides with the old architecture of rights?

Part of what made that clip feel so electric was how uncomplicated it was. A moment, captured and shared, traveling farther than anyone in that room probably predicted. The distance between a small Essex town and a million strangers shrinking in real time.

Then—poof.

Licensing has always been a form of care. It’s how writers and composers get paid. It’s how work stays intact. It’s how theatre—an art form built to disappear—maintains some kind of stability and structure.

That logic still makes sense.

The friction comes from the fact that distribution looks very different now. Anyone can post almost anything, anywhere, at any time. A rehearsal room isn’t as sealed as it once was. The lines between process and product are blurrier than they used to be.

This week, I want to sit in that friction.

Licensing in the age of virality.

Let’s get into it.

The Container

For most of theatre’s modern life, licensing functioned as a kind of container.

It protected the work from drifting too far from the people who created it. It ensured writers and composers were compensated. It created a framework for a show to exist in hundreds of different rooms across the world while still remaining recognizably itself—same story, same music, same bones.

Licensing is one of the few systems in theatre that says: this came from someone, and it deserves both credit and care.

Underneath the legal jargon lived an assumption so basic it never needed to be said out loud: what happens in the theatre stays in the theatre.

Not in the abstract sense. Literally. A performance is a live event, bounded by a place and a time. The audience for that event is the people who were there. The ticket is the threshold.

That contained-ness is part of theatre’s magic. It’s also part of its economics. When the work stays in the room, it stays intact. It builds intrigue. It creates exclusivity. Each performance is unique unto to the people making it and the people witnessing it.

So the clauses about recording and redistribution aren’t just fine print. They’re an extension of that worldview. A way of protecting the boundary. A way of keeping the work both sacred and sustainable.

That boundary is just harder to hold now.

The Environment

Bootlegs aren’t new.

For a long time, doing it required real effort—sneaking in a camera, keeping it hidden, getting the footage off the device, cleaning up the audio, uploading it somewhere, hoping it didn’t get flagged. There was friction at every step. The difficulty acted like a kind of natural limiter.

Now: the limit does not exist.

Phones are already in the room. Recording takes one tap. Posting takes another. And the cultural posture around documentation has shifted, too. Shows post curtain calls and clips filmed on iPhones. Cast members share rehearsal photos on their stories. Marketing teams treat behind-the-scenes footage as part of the life of a production. None of that is inherently wrong. A lot of it is beautiful. It makes theatre feel closer, more human, more porous.

It also blurs the line.

Not just between “private” and “public,” but between process and product. Between a proud rehearsal moment and a piece of material the licensing agreement might treat as redistribution. Between what feels like communal sharing and what counts as reproduction.

Bootlegs used to live in the shadows. Now documentation lives in daylight. The boundary didn’t disappear. It just started getting crossed in more directions, by more people, for more reasons—often without anyone acknowledging it.

And that’s the environment the Witham clip landed in.

The Friction

The Witham clip didn’t need context or a caption explaining what was happening. It carried its own proof. A big voice, a small moment, a simple room. The kind of thing people share because it feels like access—because it offers a small hit of the thing theatre does best: aliveness.

And then it disappeared.

The removal forced a question that feels uncomfortably modern: what exactly was that clip?

In a rehearsal room, it’s process. A proud glimpse. A communal “look at what we’re making.” On a platform, it reads as a piece of media—detached from the room it came from, detached from the boundaries that normally contain it. In a licensing agreement, it may read as something else entirely: a recording of copyrighted material distributed publicly.

Those interpretations aren’t just semantic. They sit on top of real stakes.

Writers and composers deserve to be paid. Rights holders have a responsibility to protect work from being freely distributed in ways that undercut its value. There are also brand and quality concerns that aren’t frivolous.

At the same time, theatre has entered an era where cultural relevance is often born out of exactly these moments. A rehearsal clip can make a person in another country feel the electricity of a show they’ve never heard of. In this case, it can turn a “community theatre” into a global attraction.

And all those things can be true.

Which is why the friction isn’t really between creators and audiences. It’s between a set of rules designed for a contained world and a culture that’s built on circulation.

The Question

The question facing theatre right now isn’t whether the work should be protected.

It’s what protection looks like when distribution is effortless.

Maybe the future includes clearer distinctions—between rehearsal documentation and performance capture, between process and product. Maybe licensing language evolves to reflect the fact that behind-the-scenes isn’t necessarily a threat. Maybe rights holders build new pathways for sanctioned proximity—because proximity is now part of how culture forms.

Or maybe the current lag continues: artists and institutions improvising in real time, trying to honor the sacredness of the room while living in a world where the room is no longer private by default.

If nothing else, the Witham clip reminded me of something simple: people want theatre. People want to be cracked open by the voice of a stranger. People want to be close to the work.

The container still matters. A lot.

The environment has changed. A lot.

And somewhere in that tension is the next version of how this art form travels.

One Last Thing is my little coda each week—the behind-the-scenes layer, the personal note after the main essay.

It’s for paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep this newsletter alive and independent. Thank you for supporting the work!!

This week: something I couldn’t fit in the essay, but feels central to the licensing conversation. (And also a picture of my dog.)

One Last Thing

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A community theatre in Witham, England—about a thousand followers on TikTok, no budget, no campaign—posted an iPhone video of their Judas (Michael Bardot) rehearsing a moment from The Last Supper in Jesus Christ Superstar.

By the time you’re reading this, it will probably have crossed a million views.

I keep thinking about that number. About the distance between a rehearsal room in a small English town and a million strangers. About how little stood between those two things.

I’m thinking about the 22-year-old Staples baddie who filmed herself at work. In uniform, on her phone, on the clock—showing the mug she printed in-store. And millions of people watched. A legacy brand found cultural relevance it couldn’t have bought.

I’m thinking about the record store in New York City that created a micro “reality show” called Revival of the Fittest. Two-minute episodes, iPhone footage, no script, no crew. Just the store, the people in it, whatever happens when the camera rolls. And now, a devoted audience.

Three completely different worlds. Three completely different scales. One thing in common: none of them had a campaign. They had a phone and a willingness to hit record.

This week, I want to understand that pattern—and what it might mean for the rest of us making things in small rooms.

Let’s get into it.

For most of recent history, reach was a resource problem.

You needed a campaign, a publicist, a media relationship, a platform. The size of your audience was roughly proportional to the size of your budget. Which meant small organizations (like community theaters, local record stores, independent retail) operated under a permanent ceiling. You could make something extraordinary and it might never travel beyond the people who already knew you.

That ceiling hasn’t disappeared entirely. But it has lifted.

What’s changed isn’t the algorithm, exactly—though the algorithm certainly matters. What’s changed is that a moment captured in a small, specific, unglamorous place can now travel as far as something made with a full production team behind it. Sometimes further. Not because of how it was made, but because of what it feels like to encounter it.

The physics of how things spread is different today than it was even 24 months ago.

The content that travels isn’t always the most produced—it’s the most proximate. The thing that feels closest to real.

What those three examples share isn’t aesthetic. It’s not that they were lo-fi, or scrappy, or accidental—though they were all of those things. It’s something more specific than that.

Each one felt like you were being let in somewhere before someone tried to make it presentable. Before the PR layer. Before the strategizing. You weren’t watching content—you were watching a person, in a place, doing something real. And that distinction, as subtle as it sounds, is everything.

In theater we talk about showing versus telling. This is the internet version of that. Discovery feels different from delivery. When content is engineered for you, some part of your brain registers the transaction. When it feels caught rather than made, something else happens—you lean in. You share it not as promotion but as a kind of gift. I found this. You should see it.

Which is interesting, because there's an entire industry built around exactly this kind of realness—but it’s only just starting to figure out how to let the internet in.

The rehearsal room. The table read. The moment an actor cracks something open for the first time and everyone in the room feels it simultaneously. The Wednesday matinee where something wild happens and the cast has to find their way through it live. The first time everyone walks through the set and it’s all suddenly very real.

These moments happen constantly. In every production, at every level. Community theatre in the suburbs. Regional theatre in a mid-size city. Off-Off-Broadway in a black box that seats forty-seven people.

And almost none of it gets documented.

Not because it isn’t worth seeing. Because there’s a deeply ingrained assumption in this industry that the show is the product. That what happens before opening night is internal—private, protected, not fully baked. That audiences should only encounter the work in its finished state, through the front door, at full price, on the advertised dates.

That logic made sense at one point. But it doesn’t hold the same way anymore.

The formal campaign—the poster, the press release, the carefully timed social posts —reaches people who are already paying attention. People who already have some relationship to theatre, who already know where to look. But it doesn’t travel far beyond that circle.

In 2026, people want access. Not advertising.

There’s a quiet, unexamined belief that what happens in the room isn’t ready to be seen. That it needs to be finished, polished, contextualized before it earns an audience. That showing the process is somehow a betrayal of the product.

It’s also a fear that’s hard to name directly: what if people see it and aren’t impressed? What if the unguarded version of the work reflects poorly on the finished one? What if we let people in and they don’t care?

Those are all real fears. But they’re based on an old model of how attention works—one where you controlled the first impression, managed the reveal, and tried to ensure the campaign landed. Now, the question isn’t whether people will see behind the curtain. It’s whether you’re the one holding it open.

Underneath all of this is something more personal than strategy. The Staples baddie wasn’t trying to build a brand. The Witham theatre wasn’t executing a beautiful content shoot. The record store wasn’t trying to fake something. They were just present. Unguarded. Willing to be seen doing the thing they actually do, without sanding it down.

That’s what traveled. Not the content. The willingness to be seen as you actually are—in process, in uniform, in rehearsal, in the middle of figuring it out.

So please, let us in. Hit record. Post the video.

You don’t have to be Witham. But you could be.

This week's One last thing is a personal reflection on my own complicated relationship to the camera, consent, and what access actually looks like when you're one of the people in the room. Plus, a picture of my dog.

It's available to paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep this work going.

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One last thing…

I’ll be honest—my relationship to these platforms is never static. It shifts. Sometimes weekly. And if I’m being really honest, a lot of it tracks with whether I’m in a show.

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Long before there are butts in theater seats, there are butts in folding chairs.

A group of actors is handed a working draft of something new—a musical, a play, an idea that hasn’t quite found its shape yet—and asked to fully commit to it for a short chunk of time. Sometimes it’s 29 hours. Sometimes it’s two or four weeks.

The arrangement is a little strange: the thing isn’t done. The writers are still finding the voice, the tone, the tempo, the heart. There’s rarely a guarantee that there will be a next step—or that you, as the actor, will be part of it if there is.

And yet, despite knowing none of this might last, something happens in that room. Actors and creatives find themselves genuinely, almost helplessly invested. Not just in the work they’re doing, but in the piece itself. Its future. Its potential. The ideas they’d bring to it if given the chance.

That’s the dirt I want to dig into this week: why we care about something we don’t own—and why the work we do in those rooms matters, even if we’re not there when the curtain rises.

Let’s get into it.

The Takeover

The ask is pretty straightforward: show up, get familiar with the material, make a few choices, ask some questions, tell the story. Execute. There is no line in any contract about emotional investment.

Then it’s day three and you’re caring in a way that goes well beyond professional. You have opinions about the show—its arc, its ending, its characters. You’ve had at least one conversation with a castmate that was less about the work and more about the potential of the work—what it could be, what it’s reaching for, whether it’s going to get there.

You’re doing creative labor nobody asked for. You’re a temporary resident acting like a legacy tenant.

Part of it is certainly the nature of the form. A reading is specifically designed to activate imagination—there are no sets or costumes. Your job is to fill the gaps. What floods in is a mysterious combination of instinct, curiosity, and (if you can believe it) feelings.

Which raises an obvious question: why? What is actually happening to us? And is it as irrational as it looks?

The Loop

There’s a psychological principle worth knowing here: the brain hates an unfinished thing.

Completed tasks get filed and forgotten. Open loops stay active, running quietly in the background. It’s why you can’t stop thinking about an unanswered text. Why you replay the last five minutes of a conversation in the shower. Why cliffhangers work.

A reading is one giant open loop.

The show isn’t finished. The future is uncertain. Nobody knows what happens next. So your brain does what it always does with something unresolved: it keeps working. On the subway. In the shower. At two in the morning when you should absolutely be asleep.

Then layer in the craft itself. When an actor commits fully to imaginary circumstances, the brain responds as if they’re real. Same pathways. Same chemicals. Belief, at a neurological level, produces genuine investment. You can’t activate one without the other. The caring is proof the commitment worked.

But here’s what makes a reading specifically strange: you’re committing to two fictions at once. There’s the fiction of the story—the characters, the world, the stakes. And then there’s the fiction of your own membership in the project. That you are a real stakeholder in something that technically isn’t yours at all. That you might be part of its future.

You have to commit to that fiction completely. Because the work suffers otherwise.

And when you commit that deeply, the fingerprints don’t wash off.

The Fingerprints

The reading ends. The actors disperse. The writers go back to the draft with fresh eyes and new questions. And the show continues—maybe without you.

But not exactly without you.

A character found more clarity because of a choice you made. A moment shifted because of something you brought that nobody wrote down. A line lands differently because you tried it five ways in a folding chair.

Your name might not be in the program. You might not be in the next workshop. You might one day watch the show open somewhere, shaped in part by conversations you remember having. And that can sting.

But your fingerprints are on the thing. Invisibly. Permanently.

It doesn’t erase the grief that comes up when a project moves on from you. But there’s something steadying about knowing that productions carry the fingerprints of everyone who ever touched them. The contribution doesn’t need credit to count.

That’s quietly radical.

We live in a culture obsessed with ownership—who made this, whose name is on it, who gets the credit, who holds the IP. A reading runs on a completely different logic. You give something with no claim on the outcome. You invest without control. You contribute without possession. And the work is better for it.

Maybe that’s the real gift of the form. Not just that it develops new musicals. But that it trains us in a rarer skill: caring about something we don’t own, shaping something we may never see finished, leaving fingerprints that may never get noticed.

Long before there are butts in theater seats, there are butts in folding chairs. And what happens in those folding chairs matters way more than we sometimes realize.

This week’s One Last Thing is a personal reflection from inside a recent reading and what it taught me about showing up in development rooms. It’s available to paid subscribers ($5/month), which helps keep this work going.

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One last thing…

I have been sitting with a Dirty Little Secret.

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