This week marked one year since Gavin Creel passed. To call him a light in an industry often covered in clouds doesn’t come close. From the moment the news broke, it was obvious his impact reached far beyond the stage. Yes, he was a brilliant performer. But it was his generosity—as an activist, a teacher, a writer, a leader, and a friend—that made the loss hit so hard.
Scroll through Instagram and you’ll see countless stories that will make you smile, laugh, and probably cry. The memories are endless. And while I’ll share my own Gavin story here, what I really want to write about is the part of Gavin’s ethos that feels larger than any one anecdote.
It’s something I’ve tried to integrate into my own DNA—a lens through which I now see the entire human experience. And if I may be so bold, I think it might be the key to the peace we, as individuals and as a collective, are desperate for right now.
The word is simple. The practice is less so. Both.
In 2023, while being interviewed for a documentary, Gavin revealed the poem that became his first tattoo:
EVERYTHING IS BOTH
WONDERFUL AND TERRIBLE
BORING AND EXCITING
IT’S OKAY THAT IT’S BOTH
OBVIOUS AND HIDDEN
SIMPLE AND COMPLICATED
WHAT A RELIEF THAT EVERYTHING CAN BE BOTH
LIGHT AND DARK
CELEBRATORY AND MELANCHOLY
What a relief indeed—that everything can be both. That truth, inked into his skin, has become the compass point I return to again and again.
So with this on our hearts, let’s do as Gavin would: go deeper and mine both the dirty rocks and sparkling gems that wait beneath the surface.
I first met him in 2016 at the opening of Waitress. One of my early red-carpet “challenges” asked people to repeat absurdly complicated food orders back to me. It was ridiculous. Total nonsense. And because everyone else was asking the traditional press questions, most people passed. I got a lot of polite no’s or confused stares.
I was twenty-three, fresh out of school, wide-eyed. And like every musical theater boy of my generation, I worshiped Gavin. The voice. The energy. The presence. He felt like the dream, standing there in the flesh.
When he reached my spot, he hugged me. Hugged me. This man whose voice I had listened to on hundreds of car rides, whose Claude in Hair had redefined what I thought a leading man could be, whose outspoken pride had nudged me closer to my own—he embraced me like a peer. Like I was already inside this strange machine I’d been pressing my nose against from the outside since I was a teen.
We played the game, he laughed, he hugged me again, and said, “See you soon.” And he meant it. Gavin showed up again and again. Always willing to play, always grateful to be silly—and afterward, always the check-in: “How are you feeling?” “What are you working on?”
That might sound small, but in an industry where conversations are usually about projects, credits, and gossip, it was radical.
Every time, it felt like a small miracle.
I learned Gavin was sick while I was on the road with Company. A close friend of his was in our cast, and I could sense the weight she was carrying. Eventually, as whispers became news, she shared that his health was failing. In that moment, my job was simply to listen, to hold space. But later, alone in a hotel room, I cried. A lot.
It was unthinkable to imagine him—this flame of a being—dimmed.
After he passed, I clung to my friend’s stories. I wanted to know the man behind the myth more intimately. And that’s when I learned about his own battles—with loneliness, with sorrow, with despair.
It startled me. How could someone who burned so brightly hold that kind of heaviness?
And yet, of course, he did. We all do. Intellectually, I know that joy and pain are neighbors. But with Gavin, the contrast was sharper. Almost impossible to reconcile—until I realized that’s the point. His radiance wasn’t in spite of the shadow. It was shaped by it.
The light was real because the dark was real too.
In some strange way, theater is a teacher of contradiction. Every show is both work and play, ephemeral and eternal, ordinary and miraculous. A curtain call is both an ending and a beginning. Every “no” is as much a lily pad as the “yes” when seen from 10,000 feet. Even opening night is the beginning of a run, and the end of the creation process.
Eight times a week we play out that truth: joy and sorrow, presence and absence, fantasy and reality live inside the same breath. Theater doesn’t try to resolve the contradiction; it asks us to sit inside it. And at its best, it reminds us that life is woven from exactly the same fabric.
The way falling in love is both grounding and destabilizing. The way an ordinary Tuesday can feel boring and miraculous depending on how the light hits.
Everything is both.
And yet, our brains don’t love contradiction. They like neat categories, sharp edges, clean boxes to tuck things into. Neuroscientists call it “cognitive closure”—that instinct to grab onto an answer, any answer, just to soothe the discomfort of not knowing. It’s why binaries are so seductive: happy or sad, good or bad, success or failure. They give us the illusion of control.
But life is not a filing cabinet. It spills over, blurs, interrupts. It refuses the either/or. Which is why the middle spaces—the both/and spaces—can feel so overwhelming. They don’t give us the same quick relief that binaries do. They demand patience, presence, humility.
I heard Brené Brown say that our nervous systems are wired to mistake uncertainty for danger. That’s why living in the gray feels so hard. Our bodies want to resolve the tension, to run toward clarity. But clarity isn’t always truth. Sometimes truth is messy. Sometimes it’s contradictory. Sometimes it’s both.
And nowhere does that show up more vividly than in grief.
Grief is both absence and presence. It devastates and it sustains. It silences us and then startles us with laughter at a memory. It’s unbearable and necessary at once—because the ache is proof of the love that made it possible.
We want to believe grief moves in a straight line, that there are stages to complete, progress to measure. But in reality it moves in loops and spirals. Anger one day, gratitude the next. Numbness in the morning, laughter by sunset. Both.
It’s no surprise then, that while reflecting on Gavin’s legacy, and the weight of his loss, trying to distill it all into something simple, digestible, easy to hold—it refused to shrink.
Gavin was everything, everywhere, all at once. A true embodiment of both.
And seeing him that way reminds me: so are we.
Simple animals and complex creatures. Lonely and beloved. Messy and pristine. Fragile and fierce. Light and dark. Rage and awe. Patient and restless. Rooted and wandering. Certain and searching. Ordinary and extraordinary. Broken and whole. Finite and infinite. Ancient and brand new. Wide awake and still dreaming.
What a relief, then, that we don’t have to choose.
To remember him is to hear delight and devastation in harmony.
To remember him is to dance with sorrow and gratitude.
To remember him is to practice being human.
See you next week ♥️
—Matt