Author: dbachman

In the early morning of Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016, Donald J. Trump, a real estate mogul and reality TV personality with no political experience, won 279 electoral votes and the presidency, despite a lifetime of shady business practices, losing three debates by embarrassingly wide margins, admitting to (and bragging about) sexual assault, and utilizing white-nationalist rhetoric, threatening the lives of women, immigrants, Muslims, people of color, Jews, and the LGBTQ community.

In the early morning of Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016, I was lying in bed, on a full dose of ZzzQuil, eyes wide open, shaking, realizing that this is the country we live in. I didn’t sleep at all that night and wandered through the rest of the day a zombie, my worst suspicions about this country confirmed in ways I couldn’t imagine.

This will not be a sob story. This election affects the livelihood of my friends and family far more than it will ever affect me, and I refuse to wallow in pity and drown in white male tears. This is about understanding and negotiating space, because at the end of this, one thing is evident.

The United States is now a safe, comfortable place to be a white supremacist.

I’m not scared of what Donald Trump is capable of. If the last five hundred days of campaigning, the loss of campaign managers, the widespread condemnation by competent, compassionate humans and politicians, and a lifetime of wildly changing stances and denying facts have proved anything, it’s that he is incapable of doing this job. The presidency of the United States is the hardest, most scrutinized position potentially in the world, and he will not be able to do this job. There will be no wall, and every other promise of his will face the resistance of a democratic minority Senate that contains more women, and women of color, than there has ever been before. He will meet resistance everywhere he turns, and he lacks the stamina to fight it.

What scares me are the people who voted him in. The people with my face and my voice. The people who used those things, and the privilege that comes with them, to deny a platform sorely needed to the marginalized. What scares me more are the white nationalists, the alt-right. The alt-right has terrorized people on the Internet for a year, and that terror is not going away. It will no longer be predominantly online, as this is the constituency that will be legitimized by a Trump presidency. He can be stopped easily, but they will not be.

Because the country told them that they are an acceptable political body, because they mobilize quickly, efficiently, robotically, terrifyingly, because they attack people where they are most vulnerable, spouses, children, and because they elected a white nationalist into office, I fear these people. I fear how they will shape this country. I fear their unprecedented legitimacy as a body, what it will do to the people I love, looking for a platform in this world. They are terrifying and horrifying, and though they must be fought and stopped, their legitimacy, the nomination of their candidate, is something worth despairing about.

What scares me is Mike Pence, a radical anti-LGBTQ politician whose track record is horrifying. Horrifying. If Trump is impeached, and he very well may be, he will be our president. The damage that could be done if that happens is unfathomable.

Right now, I’ve gotten out of bed, gone home, hugged my loved ones, and am beginning to reckon with the fact that America is so much less safe today than it was yesterday, that these forces of violence, once on the fringe, buried in the Internet, spreading their hate in private, are now free to spew the darkest, thickest bubbling sludge of human evil in public spaces. It’s hard to wrap my head around how unsafe it is to be here now, but this is the reality.

But the hardest thing to understand is this: I am complicit in this. In my maleness, in my whiteness, in my overwhelming confidence in a Clinton presidency. I didn’t do this directly, but I was born in, raised in a culture that let this happen. And at the same time, though, my existence is an offense to the white nationalists. I am Jewish, and I have a learning disability. A large, vocal group of people, now legitimate, think I should be cleansed from this earth. I listened to Trump shout about global banks controlling the world, a familiar, long-dismissed, anti-Semitic dogwhistle, and I feared for my family. I am more agent than victim, but I am both, and I am in pieces.

We do not know what the next four years will hold. I am prepared to fight, to support those increasingly marginalized by an increasingly white nationalist America, to organize, to donate, to protest, to do the work. But the world is changed. And I’m sad. And I’m scared.

They say “don’t read the comments,” and for the sake of peace of mind, that’s good advice. But I read them anyway. On YouTube videos, think pieces, and my own articles, I read them. I want to know what kind of excitement or anger causes people to put in their two cents on someone else’s work, journalistic or otherwise.

Nine times out of ten, reading the comments is a bad thing. Comment sections are rife with harassment and anger and the worst of humanity. Even though this trend is consistent, it is almost always surprising to see just how much hate is in this world, writ small, in a YouTube comment section. It is also surprising that the one thing I always see, in every piece of work on a platform with commentary, is this: “obvious bias.”

It doesn’t matter the context or the concept. No matter what, there is always someone ready and able to chirp up and point out that something on the Internet is biased, skewed in support of one belief or opinion. “Obvious bias” is the smoking gun, the thing that will undercut and discredit the work on which they are commenting.

I understand that the Internet can be evil, that these comment sections are vulnerable to the people channeling the darkest, most evil basic human instincts, but for some reason, this refrain, “obvious bias,” has me furious.

Yes, this article/video/movie/Facebook status is biased. So what? What, in all of creation, isn’t?

This notion, that if something is biased it should immediately be called out and discredited, is such an irresponsible, idiotic idea. Everything has bias, nothing truly avoids it, and the quest to eliminate all bias is foolhardy at best and dangerous at worst. While I believe this in many mediums, I want to focus on journalism for the time being.

I came around to this way of thinking, particularly in a journalistic sense, about a year-and-a-half ago, after coming across an AV Club article called “If Jon Stewart taught us anything, it’s that objectivity needs to die.” In invoking the name of the great “fake news” comedian, before even writing a single word, this article set up an interesting problem. Jon Stewart is a good comedian, but he’s also an excellent journalist, using genuine curiosity and even more genuine anger to guide research and call attention to the hypocrisies within the American government and his great adversary, Fox News. This work, for many, is legitimate and valuable journalism, enlightening and fierce, and full of feeling.

But Jon Stewart wears his bias on his sleeve. He’s angry, he’s passionate, and his words come with weight and potency, even when the primary intention of “The Daily Show” was comedy. But, even with this furious and “obvious” bias, I had the notion that what I was seeing while watching him was more compelling and interesting than any news journalism I’ve seen in the last year.

Why was this the case? It’s because, as the article I have linked to states, pretending that one doesn’t have an opinion is nefarious, bad journalism.

Attempting to be evenhanded, to take all sides into account is a noble and necessary practice, but acting like the person taking these sides into account is a blank slate offers a backward, unhelpful way to look at things. It has also become the default mode of all broadcast journalism, robotically presenting conclusions to arguments as facts. This is bad.

It’s bad because, for one, it’s a lie. We are all human beings who have all experienced the world in different ways, and those experiences inherently skew our worldview. To be human is to have an opinion, and whether it is one that is held deeply to the core of identity, or it is relatively moderate and changeable, that opinion will always put its inflection on the research and presentation of information. To act like that doesn’t exist is an act of direct deception to the public’s ingestion of  content. By presenting their own journalism as unbiased, we have to suffer through the nonsense of people like Sean Hannity, and those who believe definitively that everything he says is the truth (he is objective, after all).

It’s also bad because, for lack of a better word, objectivity is really, really boring. Without personality and inflection on display, journalism is presented as information for its own sake. While some might appreciate that, I need something more. I need to feel like what I am experiencing, seeing, and learning from has been touched by human hands. This is why we remember Walter Cronkite, telling the world that the Vietnam War should end. It’s why we remember Edward R. Murrow directly fighting McCarthyism on live TV. It’s why Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, and, yes, Jon Stewart are so compelling; these are figures who are people first and journalists second, and by filtering their journalistic information through flesh and blood and humanity, we can directly address the information, understand its biases, and not take anything at face value.

By and large, pretending to be objective, attempting to present information like it has no inflection or agenda, is the culture of the day, and it’s hurting us. It’s what allows Trump to claim that the media is “rigged” against him. It’s what gives hate groups the mainstream platforms that they have been gaining over the last year, and it’s what keeps the public complacent and accepting of whatever form of information they have been presented with.

We all have hopes, dreams, opinions. My dream is this: we stop pretending that bias doesn’t exist everywhere in the world, a lack of objectivity stops being a vilified position, and the phrase “obvious bias” disappears forever from the Internet.

The other day, while watching the Vice Presidential Debate, I had a revelation. It was a minor revelation, especially compared to the Presidential Debate that followed it (the storm of abusive and predatory behaviors and words from a racist, sexist, orange-toned human flame war) but it is certainly a relevant one. Before we learned of Trump’s continued belief in the guilt of five innocent people of color, before he outed himself as a sexual predator (and in the process lost the support of his own party), and before he pulled out all the stops to physically intimidate his opponent, there was a fairly boring encounter between two white Christian men, and Mike Pence won that encounter.

Mike Pence: Donald Trump’s steady, sure-footed running mate. Mike Pence: calm, silver-haired, and friendly-looking. Mike Pence, one of the most dangerous and backward thinking figures in American politics. Who doesn’t believe in evolution or global warming. Who signed a bill forcing aborted fetuses to be cremated or buried. Who hates Roe v. Wade. Who hates the LGBTQ community. Who caused a goddamn HIV crisis in the state of Indiana. Who believes in conversion therapy.

I’ve heard many claims that Mike Pence is worse than Trump, claims that have merit. But I have also heard the same claims that he is “presidential.” These claims also have merit. The fact that he can exist within both of these spheres is deeply troubling, and that speaks to something that has been clear for everyone to see: The 21st-century Republican Party is the most radical, reactionary mainstream political movement in living memory.

I’m welcome to face any evidence to the contrary, but as early as Sarah Palin’s vice presidential nomination, the rhetoric that was once fringe—the claims of “taking our country back,” accusing the left of holding it hostage, the cries of revolution, misrepresentations of history—oozed its way into actual political discourse. Let’s not forget the 2010 election, when the Republican congress became an obstructionist machine. Looking at their platform, which involves gutting Planned Parenthood because of a practice that isn’t actually government funded, reducing rights for people of color and the LGBTQ community, refusal to act in the wake of tragedies caused by gun violence, it is clear that the party represents literal extremism. It is a political philosophy that involves digging heels into the ground and not only fighting change, but actively seeking regression.

Republicanism is not inherently evil. I do not subscribe to it, but I do not believe it is healthy to inherently reject an entire system of belief. Conservatism, the belief in a highly limited governmental structure, has its appeal in a world that is increasingly (and almost frighteningly) interconnected. I don’t personally believe in the functionality of such a system, but I understand why someone would buy into it. But that is not what the GOP stands for. When Mike Pence is among the most prominent, emblematic members of the party, it’s clear that the political philosophy has been overtaken by a radical fringe.

So how is this a mainstream party? How has half of the American population come to support this radical, dangerous platform? The answer was laid out incredibly clearly in the Vice Presidential Debate.

It’s because Mike Pence sure doesn’t look or sound radical.

This platform has been sustained by the kind of affectation that Mike Pence thrives in. At that debate, Tim Kaine was energetic and aggressive, but pitted against the cool, calm performance of Pence, he came across as rude. Pence is a master of affect, using the cadence, tone, and presentation of his words to appear thoughtful and sane, even when he’s calling for the electro-shock therapy of gay children. That calmness gives him power. It makes him sound and seem like an authority. It makes his every gesture and shake of the head matter. It’s the kind of self-control that dominates any room he walks into. Back when he was announced, he seemed like a second-rate choice for Trump, but his calmness, to some extent, is a masterful foil to Trump’s unhinged awfulness. But it extends beyond that.

If you look at the most prominent figures in the Republican Party at this moment—Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, John McCain—they all have this affect. It exists in different forms. Ryan punctuates his words with youth and energy, McCain with age and wisdom, McConnell with Southern charm, but it’s all fundamentally in tune with Pence’s performative elements. It’s all a show, a distraction, which has helped them put forth their Randian reactionary platform. They’ve been here a great deal longer than Trump has, and they have been putting out his same agenda in far more subtle dog whistles. Through those dog whistles, they have sustained this party, in its toxic form, for far too long.

It looks like, with Trump’s continued attacks on the GOP, the party won’t exist functionally for too long. But this is not because of any new philosophies. No. It is because the GOP is a party of good actors, and Trump is a terrible one. He has exposed its awfulness. He has stripped away the affect. And if he becomes president (God forbid), and then resigns (which, if that’s the case, he probably will), President Mike Pence will try to revive the performance. Don’t let him.

There’s a reason there are so many plays, movies, and shows about the clashing of artists’ egos in plays, movies, and shows. Collaboration is complicated, especially when it’s something as personal as artistic expression might be. Above all else, it’s hard to check one’s ego at the door when producing theater. You put a group of people together who have different perspectives and conceptions of what a piece of theater should be, and there are going to be clashes. In my time working on theater inside and outside of Wesleyan, I’ve been the cause and the witness of these kinds of clashes. It’s nobody’s fault; it’s just the way it works.

The One Day Plays, however, are a whole different story. With the shortened time frame, the exhaustion, and the sheer number of people involved, clashes and ego are far less of an inevitability. I can’t claim that there are no clashes and differences of opinion, but they are smaller and less significant. They are my favorite thing that happens at Wesleyan, every semester, every year, for all the time that I’ve been here.

For those of you who do not know what the One Day Plays are, here’s how it works. A group of people come together, divided into three categories: directors, writers, and actors. There’s a preliminary meeting in which an assortment of props is brought in by various participants. Over the course of one night, the writers and cast determine the props they’ll use and then write a short play with them. The directors pick their script, meet the actors, and by the end of the day, the shows go up, usually for a sold-out audience. This is all overseen by Second Stage, with exhaustive (and exhausting) work being put in by a core group of four coordinators (in this case, Jess Cummings ’17, Cheyanne Williams ’17, Anthony Dean ’17, and Danielle Lobo ’19). The entire process is about 22 hours, taking place once a semester.

Every year, there are the same hurdles: the marathon of memorization, the distribution of props (determining who has which prop in the rehearsal process is a special kind of nightmare), the discussions of when to take a break, the endless pursuit of trying to get a few minutes of sleep before continuing the rehearsal process. After all this time, it’s gotten easier, but the struggle is part of what makes this day great. With that time frame, there’s not much time to think. You can only do and make theater.

This was my fifth ODP, and my first after a year abroad, and I missed the process. I missed being up at 5:00 a.m. on a Saturday. I missed walking through the dark, reading scripts in a cold room with props strewn on the floor, meeting my actors, making silly and absurd choices, picking up snippets of direction and dialogue from other productions. I missed the line-learning breakfasts, and the sleepy interactions, and feeling tired, so tired. Seeing my play come together. The sense of accomplishment and community.

As always, there was a wide variety of One Day Plays this year. There were the ambitious ones: a 15-minute, heavily referential Les Mis parody; madness in the shape of love and bagels; and a highly personal piece of performance art. There were also the silly ones: an odd lark in a bed and breakfast, a “She’s the Man”-type story within the world of frat hazing, and a hidden meeting between best friends Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Drumpf. And there was the show that I directed, a prophet seeing visions of an autumnal apocalypse at WesWings, which come true in the form of acorns raining from the sky. Each had their charms and their joys, but above all else, the true joy is watching a group of people who have never worked together in this form, making something that will only exist for a few minutes, for one day, and then disappear.

I did a version of the One Day Play in my year abroad, playing Macduff in a 90-minute full production of Macbeth. It was great, but it wasn’t this. It was rewarding, but with that length of time and that length of show, a lot of the joy was stifled. The fear in Wesleyan’s ODP is secondary; the scripts are so short and full of wide-ranging silliness that you don’t feel the kind of profound fear of undertaking Shakespeare in a day. It’s good, but it’s not a great, ridiculous, exhausting day, this day that I’ve lived five times and always found something new to love while doing it. In theater-making, there’s something invaluable about taking a day and making plays happen quickly, joyfully. As I type this, it is two days later, and I am still completely and totally exhausted, despite two days of long, fulfilling sleep. But I wouldn’t give the experience up for the world.

Last week, The Argus published an Opinion piece (which I, as an Opinion editor, edited) entitled “On Ghostbusters and the Way We See Women in Media.” It was a new piece, by a new writer, and I was impressed by how compact, thorough, and compelling it was. It articulates many explicit and latent issues pertaining to the film industry’s representation of women, provides a few avenues by which we could move forward, and expresses a sincere, emotional response to seeing a film (and a pretty good one at that) in which the role of women is central and essential.

Then, a few days later, I read the comments. This is my response. I address this directly to you, the specific commenters on this specific Argus article.

Stop it.

Just, stop it.

Please, stop it.

So much ink has been spilled by and about you. Your mechanical, relentless search for any piece of writing on the Internet that contains the words “new” and “Ghostbusters.” The pages and pages of comments you write on such articles. The way you are overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, male. The angry YouTube videos. The targeted harassment.

I am not here to argue. I am here to tell you to stop it.

You have had your piece. You have had your say. Over the voices of thousands of women that you have trampled, threatened, scared, silenced because you could not wrap your head around a film not being made for you (and rest assured This. Was. Not. Made. For. You.). You made yourself unable to be ignored. The world knows what you think. The world knows that your “childhood,” as you so call it, is so fragile, that something as inoffensive as a comedy about women hunting ghosts has “ruined” it. I understand. You’ve been coddled all your life. You’re not used to things that don’t directly pander to you, and you think this movie should. But it doesn’t. I’m sorry. But you’ve had your piece, you’ve had your say on every corner of the Internet. And now it’s time to stop it.

Just, stop it.

It’s absolutely exhausting. Usually, a temper tantrum wanes, it tires itself out. But this one hasn’t. It hasn’t, because you are wrong. You know you are wrong. There’s nothing more infuriating than being wrong. You may think this is discourse. It is not. You are shouting over everything and anything. Aren’t your throats tired? Isn’t there something more valuable to rage against? Do you sleep soundly at night? Or do you scream to yourself, knowing that a piece of pop culture isn’t made for you? Surely, this relentlessness hurts you, too.

But you still refuse to stop. You call feminism the cancer, but nothing in this movie, or in feminist ideology, is as harmful or scary or tiring as you are. In fact, there is nothing, in feminism or in this movie harmful or scary at all, except for having to face you and your violence-as-conversation. These are not counterarguments. Your remarks are far from discourse. They are toxic. They are corroding, and corrosive.

No, it is not a perfect movie. But if it were, would that matter to you? You know it wouldn’t. You don’t hate the thing. You hate the idea. This is terrifying.

You might not be the harassers, the people who spent so much time and effort crafting the most horrifying images and sentences and sending them to Leslie Jones, and when that was no longer acceptable, hacked her website and published her personal photos. You might not be the person directly enacting deafening, silencing violence on a person because she had the wherewithal to be black, female, excellent, and in a film that you didn’t care for.

You might not be the harassers, but your words have caused harm. Constant, consistent harm. There are people in this world who saw women on screen and felt like the world was a little bit more for them than it was before. And then they saw what you read. How you poisoned that filming. This is monstrous, and you need to just stop it.

Stop it.

You cheered when the film didn’t make money. You wept with joy when you maintained order and snuffed out the light of people trying to make the world a more friendly place.

I am not trying to reason with you. I am not looking to be engaged with you. I am angry, and you have been awful, and this has to stop, and this has to stop now.

After I write this, and it is edited, this piece will be published, and a few days after that, it will be rife with your anger, your bile, your evil. You will have proven my point. Congratulations. Celebrate your righteous anger!

Then stop.

Please stop.

Stop.

Theater is not an easy thing to do. It requires so many moving parts, so much organization, time, skill, preparation, and talent. This is especially the case for musicals, in which all the effort required to put on a show is compounded by all the effort required to make music. I have been involved in many musicals and they’re all exhausting, but there are few as difficult as the John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Joe Masteroff creation “Cabaret.”

“Cabaret,” first performed in 1966, is a show about lonely, desperate people converging in Berlin at the Kit Kat Klub, a less-than-respectable nightclub in the city. A writer falls in love with a show girl, an elderly landlady and a fruit vendor find happiness in each other, but the city around them falls to the Nazi party as they tear apart themselves and each other. The show uses its nightclub location as a device to comment on itself as a performance, and as a natural way to amplify emotion through song-and-dance. It’s a difficult show to pull off, but last weekend, the creative team of director Sarah Corey ’15, choreographer Beanie Feldstein ’15, and music director Max Luton ’17 attempted it nonetheless.

There were a lot of elements of the production that the show was fortunate to have, including a large cast featuring actors and musicians of immense talent. Visiting international student Youri Rebeko anchored the show with his gaunt, strange, engrossing portrayal of the Emcee. Rebeko, the show’s de facto lead, strutted around the stage with poise, skill, and commitment to one of the most iconic parts in the history of musical theater. The show’s central couple, uninspired author Cliff Bradshaw (Paul McCallion ’15), and alluring-yet-distant showgirl Sally Bowles (Tess Jonas ’15) turned in two very strong performances, as did Ben Zucker ’15 as Herr Schultz, a Jewish fruit vendor, and Sarah Wax ’18 as Fräulein Schneider, an old landlady and the recipient of Schultz’s affections. Each of the show’s most prominent roles was well formed thanks to Corey’s direction and the talent of the performers. There’s a searing anger and desperate fear underneath the skin of these characters that, when occasionally revealed, made for a dynamic performance.

As the songs in “Cabaret” are iconic, their execution was paramount to the quality of the show as well. Fortunately, due to Luton’s musical direction, “Cabaret” sounded excellent. The band and the performers moved confidently through classic musical numbers like “Willkommen,” “Don’t Tell Mama,” “Maybe This Time,” and “Two Ladies,” and each song was effective and comprehensible, and pushed forward by strong choreography. It certainly helps that Jonas and Rebeko, who get the lion’s share of the music, have powerful, expressive voices. The former’s rendition of the show’s title track, completely alone on stage, and the latter’s performance of “If You Could See Her,” as sung to an actor in a gorilla suit, are both powerful, interesting moments. And “Two Ladies,” always a comic highlight of the show, keeps all of its humor intact.

While these elements of “Cabaret” were very strong, some elements of the show did weaken it. One of the most compelling elements of “Cabaret” is the constant interjection of the Kit Kat Klub into the world outside of it. When Cliff decides to do some smuggling to earn money, the show immediately follows with a Kit Kat Klub performance of the hypnotic “Money.” When it becomes clear that Herr Schultz will become a target of the violence of Nazism, the Emcee sings “If You Could See Her.” The Klub exists as a place in which the show can comment on itself in comedic, tragic, and always engaging ways. However, in this production, while the commentary is still there, the world of the Klub and the world outside it feel markedly disparate. There are transitions, the changing of light, the moving of furniture, that prevent the two elements of the show from bleeding into each other. The Emcee, usually a constant presence, commenting on the action when he shouldn’t be there, is absent from most “acting” scenes. He feels shackled to the Klub, which makes it a less magical place. In this act of separation, some of the show’s energy feels undercut. When the Emcee does interact with the world outside of the club, it is a totally different performance, silent and stoic in a way that it can only be perceived if you look close enough. It’s an interesting choice, and it feels deliberate, but it’s a change that slows down the proceedings. Each scene feels like it’s in its own world, and that limits the ability to draw on the energy of the scenes around it.

Putting on this production in Psi U amplified the play’s transparency. Members of the cast and ensemble walked through the rows of audience members, and could be seen on every side of the stage. That being said, the stage itself was difficult to see from most of the seats. Everything that happened below the shoulders of many actors was woefully imperceptible. The fact that the performance was understandable even with these limitations is a testament to the talent of the people involved, but the lack of visibility did not work in the show’s favor.

There is a lot to like about this production of “Cabaret.” It boasted some very strong performances, both in song and in scene, and had moments of great power, humor, and devastation. However, it could have used more self-commentary, a better space, and a more cohesive integration of the world. Even so, it was a huge, complex musical that required dedication and talent to make. That’s something worth celebrating and singing about.

There are plenty of stories about growing up, but there are none like Naomi Wallace’s “The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek.” It is a play that expertly combines coming of age and coming apart, a masterfully abstract exercise in identity, age, parentage, love, and even corporeality. It is a play I had never seen, nor heard of before, with a name that immediately prompts the question, “What the hell is a trestle?” It is also a play that I’m glad the people of Wesleyan were able to see: beautiful, ambitious, chaotic.

Trestle takes place during the Great Depression and begins with two teens—the brash and enigmatic Pace Creagan (Cheyanne Williams ’17) and the reserved, angsty Dalton Chase (Jack Reibstein ’17)—under a railroad. Pace has dared Dalton to run the train that passes through their town every day. They begin practicing running the train, becoming more and more enthralled with one another, sharing hopes, fears, mourning, abstraction, and developing a strange, ethereal love. Interspersed with these scenes are glimpses into Dalton’s home, with his mother (Elli Scharlin ’18) and father (Connor Boughton ’15) breaking under the strain of their financial troubles and the weight of their own beings. There are also several scenes in a jail cell with a strange, funny, sad prison guard (Thomas Van de Pas ’17) attempting to understand self-destruction in the people he’s guarding through the contexts of other animals. The three worlds of “Trestle”—the home, the train, and the prison—converge and diverge to thrilling narrative and metaphysical effect.

This production of “Trestle” really leans into the ambition of the show. Many scenes seem to take place in an anti-place, an almost-magical world in which a plate can temporarily repair a broken man, a chemical burn can radiate with blue light, and a shadow-puppet can be talked about with hushed reverence. The set, mainly consisting of four cross-hatched trestles, dances with light and shadow, exaggerating the surrealism of the play’s bleak anti-world.

It’s a well-designed and well-directed show, something that strengthens the individual performances. Williams brings a pronounced energy to her character, wringing a lot of humor out of a part that could have ultimately been unbearably bleak. Reibstein, the show’s de-facto lead, anchors the show with his performance, giving his character weight and youth. Scharlin and Boughton each get moments bursting with power and feeling; Scharlin desperately tries to hold her world together, and Boughton’s has already fallen apart. And Van de Pas plays his character as a true eccentric, gaunt, grim, and unbelievably strange. Each of these characters have true standout moments: Williams’ interaction with a small broken engine, Boughton’s careful despair punctuated by bursts of emotional power, Scharlin’s wit and tragedy bathed in light, pre-intermission, Reibstein’s quiet and devastating prison scenes, and Van de Pas, impersonating a turtle, wringing out humor and pathos in equal parts.

This is a show that decontextualizes physical and mental associations. Love and contact, despair and volume, absence and presence. This makes the abstract nature of the performances resonate, but sometimes works in the show’s disfavor. There are moment that feel off-balance and decentered, without something to hold onto from an audience perspective. Oddly enough, this happened more in the middle of each act. This is particularly the case in the middle exchanges between Pace and Dalton.

Those moments tend to repeat themes and motions a little too often, which weakens both characters. The momentum picks up at the end of each act, but changes in staging, and more of a concrete center to the action would have made the show more propulsive, even in its most abstract and contemplative.

“Trestle” is a production that aims very, very high, and accomplishes much of what it attempts to achieve. It’s not perfect, but it’s impressive and powerful. It was thought-provoking, and brought onto the stage moments of supreme power. That’s something that the entire “Trestle” team should be proud about, and something it was a privilege to witness.

I’ve been involved in theater since middle school, but I didn’t love it until I came here. During my freshman year, I started to see all of the creative freedom and versatility that theater had to offer. Then I realized that I had to at least try and direct something through Second Stage.

So, right now, as I am writing this, I am.

I spent the last year talking to, working with, and studying the work of many different directors, all of them far better than I. It is still ongoing, and I’m beginning to grasp how space can be manipulated, how to make a scene interesting, what’s too much and what’s not enough. There was (and still is) so much to learn, but it was time to give it a go regardless.

At the end of spring semester my freshman year I saw a short, experimental production of “Where the Wild Things Are.” Much of the action took place on the top of Indian Hill Cemetery. The hill is absolutely gorgeous, impossibly green, surrounded by trees, but it is also surrounded by death. There was a resonance to this that that I felt deeply while I was watching this production. I could do more with this.

Having meditated on this for months, I had a plan. I had chosen a play, one of my all-time favorites, Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.” I paired down a 12-person cast to be shared between four actors; two as the titular underwritten Hamlet characters, two as the Players that perform the world around them. I had a thorough plan, I was excited, and I was ready, but I was also competing with a great many productions, many with more experienced teams.

When it was time for auditions, I did not get a huge showing of actors to read for the parts. The actors who did audition, however, were very good, and I began to see the show coming together. Despite many actors who I called back dropping out, I ended up with an excellent cast, and rehearsals began in earnest. I began focusing on my two Players, who play nine different parts over the course of the show, working with them to occupy the physical and vocal spaces of many different people to quell what confusion their multi-casting would cause, which was a roaring success.

But then I hit a snag. One of my actors, struggling with lines and his own schedule, dropped out. Ze was one of my leads. Hir desire to leave was understandable given the pressure of this campus, but still I was terrified. My stage manager, Hazem Fahmy ’17, talked me down from my fear, and we sat down and gathered people to read for us. Within 24 hours, we had a new actor, and the show went on.

Having a full cast again, it was time to begin blocking the show—systematically rehearsing it, scene-by-scene, until everyone knew what they should do and where they were supposed to be. And blocking was great. My actors would run a scene, based on preliminary comments and their own instincts, we’d stop, I’d ask for something to change, be it a motion, an intonation, or a reaction. Then we’d run it again. I’ve never had more fun working on a show. Having a group of people invested in my interpretation of a huge, strange, script is as humbling as it is ego-inflating.

As of Tuesday, April 14, all of the show has been blocked. There are only a few weeks left until “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” is brought to Indian Hill, on May 1, 2, and 3. We still have a lot of work left to do. It is going to be challenging, it will be mentally and physically exhausting, and I expect at least one more crisis, but I know that come the beginning of May, surrounded by graves and grass, there will be a show. And that’s pretty exciting.

Sufjan Stevens’ new album, Carrie and Lowell, is just about the most devastatingly intimate thing I’ve ever heard. There are hushed, whispered vocals, tracks that were recorded on an iPhone, the distinctive hum of an air conditioner in the background; but the kicker is the content, as Sufjan mourns his mother, chronicles his own self-destructive tendencies, and ultimately finds a reason to live through memory, faith, and beauty. So when I filled my car with friends and left campus to see these songs performed live, I wasn’t looking for a good time.

On Sunday, April 13, 2015, Stevens continued his tour at The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford, Connecticut. I had my tickets before Carrie and Lowell was even released, and I had no idea what to expect. But I knew that I wanted revelation.

Before that revelation, there was the opening act, Cold Specks. Propelled by the sheer force of vocalist Al Spx, Cold Specks was a worthy beginning to the night. The band operated in a musical niche worth exploring, a hybrid of stripped down indie and gospel. The muted, percussive instrumentals that underscored Spx’s voice made for an impressive, hypnotic, digestible set. Cold Specks’ half hour set culminated with Spx, alone on stage, armed with a guitar, potently protesting the turmoil and police brutality against black life. Since the artist following her would play songs about inner life and emotional trauma, it was good to begin by looking outward and around before plunging into one man’s private life.

A change of set, an opening of a curtain, and Stevens took the stage. Wearing a “Hustler” shirt and a green cap, head down, he quietly sat at a piano and plunked out the arrhythmic, lovely chords to “Redford,” opening his mouth to unleash the quiet ethereal stream of his voice into The Bushnell. His band, small in number, swiftly walked to their various instruments, and joined his call. Then there were a few seconds of silence, a switching of instruments, a light shift, and the true opening performance. With the assistance of spare, lovely acoustic and slide guitar, Stevens played a rendition of “Death With Dignity,” Carrie and Lowell’s devastating opener.

Stevens then proceeded to play the entirety of his new album, rearranging the music in ways that were sometimes natural, sometimes surprising, and always beautiful. The song “All of Me Wants All of You,” on the album consisting merely of a single acoustic guitar, was repurposed effectively into slow, energized electropop. “Drawn to the Blood” a beautiful, painful meditation on Christian folklore and personal sanity, was performed solo, while Stevens was bathed in red light. The line “he called me Subaru,” from album-highlight “Eugene,” was met with a rare laugh from an otherwise quiet, focused audience. The mystical but harshly real conversation across the grave in “Fourth of July,” on album a dirge of ambient techno and quiet piano, was transformed into an act of both defiance and submission, as the final line “we’re all gonna die” repeated over increasingly amplified post-rock instrumentation: squelching synths, pounding drums, thick guitar. Some of these songs were just too delicate and fragile to play live the way they were on record. Smartly, Stevens and his band created versions that could translate to a live audience, without sacrificing the immense emotional weight.

It was clear that Stevens felt the intensity of his own music as much as I did. Often, his vocal lines wavered, cracked, dipped, or raised in pitch. I at first attributed this to a lack of training or a weak voice, but after hearing perfect renditions of non-album tracks later into the night, it became apparent the cause of these missed notes and wrong pitches: these songs were physically and emotionally painful for Stevens to sing. It is incredibly generous, then, that he still endeavors to share them with audiences. After playing for over an hour, he addressed the audience for the first time to state that this tour has been “an uphill battle” for him. Watching the footage displayed on a picket-fence shaped monitor behind the band—home movies, skylines, mountain ranges, flat heart monitors—was like looking into the mind of another person. It was the perfect externalization of the most intimate and internal release of the year.

Standout performances of the night came one after the other. Sitting alone at a piano, Stevens performed “The Owl and the Tanager,” a seven-minute track I had never heard before. It was as virtuosic as it was honest: beautiful fluttering chords, devastating lyrics, and incredible vocal control. Hearing this song for the first time in this setting was a gift.

But the true gift was the song that followed. Carrie and Lowell album closer “Blue Bucket of Gold” began relatively faithful to the original recording, but then the lyrics ended, and the band came in. What followed was a 10-minute coda of noise rock, set to the dance of two disco balls and a dozen lights, rising continually until the end. It was overwhelming in its volume, scope, and beauty; it was the moment that Carrie and Lowell’s whisper truly became a band. At the end of its ascension I felt lighter, as if something had been purged from me.

Ultimately, that’s what the night was: a cathartic experience for the man on stage. If it was someone without Sufjan Stevens’ considerable talent, this would not have made for a great concert, but in his hands, it felt like a privilege. When the show ended in a joyous rendition of “Chicago,” it felt like an earned moment of celebration for an artist giving everything he’s got.