BWW Blog: Samantha Tirrell - Closing BACKBEARD

On Sunday, we closed the world premiere of Backbeard: A New Musical at the Theatre Institute at Sage after a short two-week run. It came and went too quickly, and I do not know that any of us could have anticipated just how profoundly this sweet little musical would move us, how deeply it would nestle itself into our hearts.

Closing a show is always difficult - it is a poignant reminder that our art is ephemeral, and that anything we choose to create in our field will leave us in time. This is a part of the work, but with these particular losses come significant gain -- the process of putting something onto its feet, letting it stand on its own, and eventually letting it go allows us to become the people and the artists that we are and that we will become. Theatre artists must grow accustomed to this sense of gaining through loss, as our work is defined by its reliance on endings and new beginnings to promote its continual growth and prosperity. We leave a piece behind in order to have the time, energy, experience, and creativity to bring to the next -- our endings serve as the foundational stepping stone for the next project, whatever and whenever that may be.

With that, there is something more to be said about closing works like Backbeard. In child psychology, there is an existing dichotomy between process and product in the pursuit of artistic fulfillment, with emphasis placed heavily on process in the growth and development of young artists. With the exception of the creative and design team, this production of Backbeard relied heavily on about 25 college-aged artists, some of whom have been working with the material since bits of it were first introduced to us in April of 2015. For us, this process has meant something significant, something much larger than anything else we have experienced in our work before. We saw the holistic birth of a piece, from one of its earliest stages to its first full-fledged production, during which many hands worked in tandem to build and create together for the sake of the art. We experienced what it means to build theatre from its foundations, and through the collaborative nature of our craft, Backbeard became. We experienced its becoming.

As students of this craft, sharing in the energy bursting from the creators of this project--Michael Musial and Matthew McElligott specifically--is an awareness that cannot be adequately verbalized. However, it is why this blog exists. When you can feel inspiration and energy as profoundly as could be felt with Backbeard, it is evident that you have become a piece of something special. It deserves to be discussed, to be read about it, to be seen. It deserves time. And while that energy can never be neatly packaged and translated to a language we can speak or read, we have felt it. We have shared it, with each other and with our audiences. And with it, we are changed. If the process of creating is indeed crucial to the formative development of artists, we are so lucky to have been a part of something as absolutely transformative as Backbeard was.

Either literally or figuratively, everyone who touched this production will pick it up and carry it to whatever is next. The creators will take another look at the material, explore what worked and fix what did not -- they will carry Backbeard with them until it is time to do it again, with a new group of artists, in a new space, for new audiences. The rest of us will carry it with us as a perpetual reminder that no matter how difficult or tedious our work and our industry is, there are magic moments--short fragments of time during which everything is exactly as it should be--that will define our work for us for the rest of our lives.

I think that all of us know, deep down, that anything this special, anything that moved us as much as this project did, will never really be over. A temporary goodbye is all this is.