Why We Theater
Unraveling the question that haunts every theater person I know.
Every theater person I know has been haunted at some point. And I don’t just mean by the ghosts in the rafters and dusty dressing rooms and rickety catwalks. I mean the other kind of haunting. The quieter one.
It sounds like: why are we still doing this?
It’s the question we all think about but rarely say out loud. It sneaks in during the pause before places are called, or in the middle of a long run, or between jobs, or when the news outside feels too heavy to walk through the stage door.
Because let’s be honest—this life is strange. We spend our days pretending to be other people so that strangers can feel a little more like themselves. We build an entire world each night just to have it disappear before bedtime.
It’s beautiful. It’s brutal. And sometimes, it’s hard to tell what it’s all for.
Still, we keep showing up. We rehearse. We sweat. We sing. We make pretend, and every once in a while, in the middle of all that pretending, something real happens. Something that reminds us why we started.
That’s what I want to sit with this week—the dissonance between how hard this life can be and how holy it sometimes feels. Why we keep choosing to gather, to believe, even when the world outside feels like it’s falling apart.
Shall we?
The Inheritance
Before we called it theater, we called it gathering.
Before there were curtains or critics, there was a circle and a story. Someone stood, someone listened, and something passed between them.
That’s the part I try to remember when the whole enterprise starts to feel absurd—that we didn’t invent this. We inherited it. The instinct to gather and make meaning is older than language, older than buildings, older than the word art itself. Around fires, in temples, in courtyards, we’ve always found a way.
Maybe that’s why it still feels sacred, even now. Beneath the microphones and projections and marketing plans, the form hasn’t changed. We still ask the same impossible questions in public and hope someone in the dark nods back. We still build a temporary world to understand the one we’re stuck in.
Every cue, every line, every blackout is just the modern echo of that first ritual. A call and response that’s been happening for thousands of years. Not to worship illusion, but to remember reality—to remember us.
And yet, the remembering is temporary. It comes, and then it’s gone. It burns bright, and then it disappears.
But maybe that’s not by accident.
The Disappearing Act
Maybe theater’s greatest magic trick isn’t that it creates something from nothing, but that it returns from something to nothing.
Every night we build a world designed to vanish—painted, lit, and lived in, only to be swept clean when the ghost light goes up. And still, we do it again. We chase the same lines, the same cues, the same moments, not because we think we can hold them, but because something happens in the holding and the letting go.
That’s what makes theater different from every other art form. A film stays. A painting hangs. A song can be played again and again. Theater is the only one that has to die to have been real. That vanishing isn’t a flaw—it’s the essential feature.
Maybe that’s why it hurts. To Love something that disappears is to agree to heartbreak as part of the deal. You can’t phone it in. You can’t scroll it later. The only way to experience it is to show up, to be there, to be with. Presence isn’t a side effect of theater; it’s the admission price.
So we keep repeating the cycle. Not to escape reality, but to practice being present in it.
And presence looks and feels a lot like Love.
The Practice
What makes theater dangerous—what makes it holy—is that it refuses to let us stay spectators. You come in as an observer, but if it’s working, at some point you get pulled in. You start caring. And once you’ve cared in here, it gets harder not to care out there.
The presence (Love) we practice inside theaters doesn’t stay put. It leaks. It recalibrates our attention. It makes us a little more porous, a little less afraid.
Because presence is costly. To be here, fully, means you can’t hide from what’s happening—not the joy, not the grief, not the world outside the lobby doors. Theater teaches us how to look anyway. How to stay with it.
Maybe that’s the quiet service we perform every night: we gather, we feel, we leave changed—a little more awake to the mess we’re in, a little more willing to meet it wholly.
The world outside is built for distraction. Everything in it rewards distance: scroll, skim, swipe, move on. But theater drags us back to slowness, to breath. It reminds us that attention itself is an act of care.
And maybe that’s what Love really is—not soft or sentimental, but active, messy, brave. The choice to look at what is and stay anyway.
The Return
So maybe that’s why we keep gathering. Not to fix the world, but to remember how to be in it.
Every night we practice: presence, attention, care. We rehearse what it means to look at each other without armor, to listen without needing to win, to Love without guarantee. It’s not escape. It’s endurance.
The world outside is still loud and fractured. But in here, for a moment, we build a small version of what could be—a room full of people choosing to stay. And then, like everything else, it ends. The lights come up. We go home.
That’s the point. We do it again tomorrow, and the night after that, because faith—like theater—isn’t something you have. It’s something you do.
We keep showing up. We gather the wood, we light the fire, we tell the story, and then we put the fire out.
And for a few hours, we remember, again, what it feels like to be alive—together.
One last thing…
It’s the final week of previews for BEAU. Probably my last day of rehearsal for the year. Opening night is Monday.
This will be my third run of a show in 2025, which still feels wild to say. And if I’m honest, nothing about this season has been easy. I’ve been stretched—as an actor, a singer, a person. Spiritually. Emotionally. Physically. Financially.
Maybe that’s why this question keeps circling me. Because when the work gets hard and heavy, I need to remember what it’s all for.
Years ago, I learned about a concept that’s become part of my DNA. It’s at the heart of this piece. The idea that everything we say or do is an act of Love or fear. I’m not big on binaries, but this one is a helpful frame for me.
I try to use it every time I’m about to start a show, or a friend calls, or I step onto the subway. That even though I don’t have the power to solve world hunger or rewrite policy, I can still inch the collective heart of the world a little closer to the side of Love.
The moments are small—microscopic, even. And from far away, they don’t look like much. But they add up.
So if you’re feeling caught in the hurricane of the world, try to get present. Here and now. Ask yourself what you can do in this moment—and the next one—that’s on the side of Love instead of fear.
That’s what’s carrying me through lately. Maybe it can carry you, too.
See you next week ♥️
With Love,
—Matt