Theater's Heated Rivalry
What a gay hockey show reveals about competition, creativity, and the cost of opposition.
On New Years Eve, Brandi Carlile proclaimed that Heated Rivalry was all she could think about. I was relieved to hear I was not alone.
By that point, the show had already saturated the zeitgeist. From clips, edits, and memes to magazine covers and late-night appearances. Watching that kind of momentum build has been fun—and if I’m honest, genuinely fascinating.
It’s not just that a “gay hockey show” cut through. It’s that people seem deeply obsessed with this story: two people positioned as opponents, a system that needs them to stay that way, a culture that insists competition is natural, inevitable—even erotic?
As the conversation swelled, I couldn’t shake the sense that all of this felt familiar. Not because of hockey—I retired somewhere around eighth grade—but because I’ve seen this logic before.
The quiet comparison. The constant measuring. The binary of winners and losers. It’s a dynamic creative people have gotten very good at internalizing—especially in theater.
So that’s what I want to sit with this week: why opposition has become such a dominant organizing principle in our industry—and the companionship we might be missing out on.
On Thin Ice
One of the smartest things Heated Rivalry does is treat rivalry like a device.
Not an accident. Not a personality trait. Not even a misunderstanding. A mechanism.
The show understands something basic about audience psychology: we don’t just like stories—we like scoreboards. We like tracking a relationship the way you watch a game. Clear sides. Clear stakes. Rivalry gives us all of that.
And their rivalry isn’t just between them—it’s upheld by the context around them. Teams. Careers. Reputations. Public perception. It’s as if the entire ecosystem is constantly whispering: don’t cross the line.
These two men are positioned as natural enemies long before they ever get the chance to decide what they actually are to each other. The rivalry is arranged to make closeness feel forbidden and conflict feel inevitable.
Which, I think, is part of what makes Shane Hollander’s internal battle so compelling. Yes—he’s grappling with feeling deeply drawn to another man for the first time in his life. But that man is supposed to be his enemy.
As their careers accelerate, the ice gets thinner. The contradiction becomes harder to carry. The person he’s supposed to hate is the one who understands him best.
That’s the real mechanism on display. Rivalry not as drama, conflict, or opposition, but as a system that creates a split—between who we are and who we’re told we should be.
Theater’s Heated Rivalry
Theater has its own version of this, it’s just wearing a different costume.
We don’t call it rivalry most of the time. We call it the business. The hustle. Paying dues. Having thick skin. Being “in the mix.” Competition becomes a fact of nature—like gravity—rather than a story we’ve been trained to accept.
And to be fair: there is competition. There are limited seats, limited stages, limited jobs. There is scarcity. There are real stakes.
But most of the time, getting a role isn’t about beating someone else. It’s about a weird, hyper-specific alignment of timing and chemistry and taste and budget and height and vocal color and how you look next to the other person and what the director dreamed about on the subway that morning. It’s about a thousand variables, most of which have nothing to do with talent and almost none of which can be controlled.
And yet, the lived experience of it can still feel like a contest.
Once we’re in the rehearsal room, the stakes rise. Ideas start to feel precious. What should be a shared goal can quietly turn competitive—ego reframes collaboration as something to win instead of build.
Zoom out further, and shows behave the same way. We start treating attention like a finite substance, as if one show’s success has to come at another’s expense. Awards seasons amplify it. The Tonys start to feel like The Hunger Games. Even the language turns athletic: who’s “winning” or “losing” at the box office. Which show is “the one to beat.”
Add all of this up and you get the Shane Hollander fracture: the moment when the thing that makes you singular starts to feel like a liability.
You’re drawn toward honesty. Softness. Specificity. Some strange, unrepeatable essence that is actually yours. And then—explicitly or implicitly—you’re told to sand it down. To be more digestible. To be more legible. To be more appealing to more people.
Eventually, the mechanism stops being theoretical and starts being something you carry.
Alone, Together
More than anything, rivalry wears and weighs on our relationships.
It turns someone else’s success into evidence of our failure. A constant low-grade monitoring: am I doing it right, am I enough, am I falling behind?
It’s exhausting. Not in a dramatic way. More in a drip-drip way. Like a slow leak.
You can hear it in how artists talk about themselves. How quickly we default to self-deprecation. How often we speak about our work like it’s on trial. How hard it is to say I’m proud without immediately qualifying it, shrinking it, joking it away.
When peers become mirrors we can’t stop checking, colleagues and friends turn into benchmarks. Even though we’re surrounded by people who understand this life better than anyone else, we’re quietly taught—like Shane and Ilya—to see them as the ones we should be trying to “beat.”
That’s the hidden cost.
Not just exhaustion, but isolation. Not just pressure, but the erosion of companionship. The longer we live inside opposition, the harder it becomes to remember why we wanted to do this at all: to make things and experience something together. To understand ourselves and one another more deeply.
Rivalry works against all of that.
The Cottage
Heated Rivalry’s final episode is more than just a change in location.
The Cottage is a place where competition loses its utility. Where performance relaxes. Where the need to win dissolves into the relief of being understood. Where the very person they were taught to oppose becomes the one who makes real rest possible.
What’s striking isn’t just that Shane and Ilya choose each other—it’s that choosing each other allows them to choose themselves more honestly. Outside the machinery of rivalry, they don’t become less ambitious. They become more aligned. Less split. Less at war with their own instincts.
That’s the part that makes me teary.
When we stop organizing our lives around opposition—when we grant one another the grace of Love, generosity, curiosity—we don’t just change how we relate to others. We soften how we relate to ourselves.
The Cottage isn’t escapism. It’s not withdrawal. It’s a reminder that another structure is possible. One built on companionship instead of comparison. On shared meaning instead of metrics.
Turns out, rivalry isn’t the only thing capable of motivating or moving us. Love—of the work, of each other, of ourselves—can be just as inspiring, just as galvanizing, without requiring us to fracture in the process.
That’s what’s waiting for us at The Cottage.
So—see you there?
One last thing…
If you don’t mind, I want to stay at The Cottage just a second longer.
I’ve been thinking about what it might mean as a practice. What it looks like to focus less on scoreboards and more on making room to breathe.
This was my first week after closing BEAU, and it’s been…interesting. I’ve had to give myself permission to move slowly. To be quiet. To reacclimate to real life.
There’s always a kind of withdrawal after a show ends. The dopamine fades. The structure disappears. The silence can feel disorienting at best—and heavy at worst. I’m closer to the former, thankfully, but that doesn’t mean I’m totally settled yet.
When you suddenly wear the label “unemployed actor,” it’s easy for old narratives to creep in: failure, falling behind, losing—despite the fact that the label only arrives after you’ve been working.
The truth feels simpler than the stories we tell ourselves. This quiet is earned. This breath is earned. The waves need to settle before they swell again.
At some point, we all need to go to The Cottage—and the moment after closing a show feels like as good a time as any.
So I’m going to keep things slow and steady for a bit. Sit by the metaphorical fire. Listen to the loons on the lake. And trust that when it’s time to step back onto the ice, I’ll be rested and ready.
See you next week ♥️
—Matt
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