Your Brain on Broadway

You haven't fallen out of love. Probably.

Alan Cumming, 1999

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.