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"Mr. O’Neill has got a whole trunk full of plays,” he smiled.
That didn’t sound too promising, but I said: 'Well, tell Mr. O’Neill to come to our house at eight o’clock tonight, and bring some of his plays.'
So Gene took Bound East for Cardiff from his trunk, and Freddie Burt read it to us, Gene staying out in the dining room while the reading went on. He was not left alone in the dining room when the reading had finished.
Then we knew what we were for."

-Susan Glaspell, The Road to the Temple: A Biography of George Cram Cook, as excerpted in An Ideal Theater, by Todd London (emphasis mine)

There is the moment where we fall in love with theatre.
Then there is the moment where we know what we are for. 
These are not necessarily the same moments. 

I fell in love with theatre on my elementary school stage singing "There's No Business Like Show Business." Falling in love with theatre was easy. I do it all the time. 

But knowing what we're for--that clarity of shared purpose felt by the Provincetown Players the first time they heard Eugene O'Neill's work--that's harder. Here's how it happened for me. 

I'm playing Bardolph in an excellent production of Henry IV, Part One. It's my favorite scene in the play, where Hal and Falstaff roleplay Hal's father. Maybe it's one of my favorites in all of Shakespeare. And right then, living my professional dream, the floor drops out from under me.

Why am I there? Who are these people in the audience? Why do they care about this story? Why this story now and not another? 

I couldn't answer the questions.

I was temping at TCG in-between acting gigs and playwriting opportunities. I decided to join TCG part-time, then full-time. With a community not all that different in spirit or purpose than the Provincetown Players, I co-founded Flux Theatre Ensemble. With TCG, I had the opportunity to ask questions with a fieldwide lens. With Flux, I asked them in the smallest arrangement of particles in the theatre, an ensemble.

In asking these questions, I began to feel that the Bohemia of collective art-marking wasn't all that different from Martin Luther King Jr's vision of a Beloved Community. Both manifest in sudden flashes, when everyone in the room is suddenly their whole and glorious selves together, and a new world becomes possible. Neither stays long. But each time they manifest, a crack in the edifice of oppression is made, and one day soon the whole thing will tumble down, and we'll be free.

I felt it manifest in the very first How We Move Forward session at the 2015 TCG National Conference in Cleveland, when Khanisha Foster led the room in an exercise of shared purpose.

I felt it on stage in Flux's production of Jane the Plain, when an actor's mistake was turned by the ensemble into something more beautiful.

I felt it coming out as my whole self to both my Flux and TCG communities. 

And whenever I feel it, I remember what I am for. 

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This post is a part of the Our Stories salon, curated as part of TCG's 2019 Gala: Our Stories in support of TCG's vision of a better world for and because of theatre. To participate in the salon, email Gus Schulenburg. To attend the TCG 2019 Gala, go here. To support TCG's work, go here.