Being 38 is weird. I think about my parents a lot. I think about this statistic I heard (that was probably just a Tweet) that once you leave for college, you’ll see your parents approximately 20 more times in your life. I remember the biggest laugh I’ve probably ever laughed was when my dad would sing to me in the bathtub. I wonder every day, “Am I making my mom proud?” I think about how scared I am for them to believe misinformation on Facebook.
If I were to be a really good dramaturg of my own life, I think all these thoughts are circling back to one big question:
When you go, what is gone? What is left?
Or, as M asks in Cordially, “Will I remember [them] right?”
But like—HOW am I supposed to know the answers to those questions? And I know it’s not just me. And I know it’s not just now. Humans have grappled for millennia to understand and cope with this, the most profound loss. And often, we’ve told stories. Often, we’ve made theatre. And that’s what we’ve done here for you tonight.
The theatre is an alchemical space, a deeply holy and magical one, a place we get to go and fall in love with characters grappling with our greatest questions, fears, and hopes for a couple hours and then return to our lives more equipped to meet our murkiest moments head on—in so many ways, it can be this beautiful trial run of the things that feel too great for us to comprehend, let alone tackle, on our own.
One of the greatest challenges about being a human, especially right now, is existing within a world that every day feels crumblier and crumblier. One of the greatest privileges of working on Keiko’s play over the past couple years has been the constant reminder it offers us, that at the center of all the tumult and confusion is life, is love, is connectivity, mutuality, family (chosen and born into). This play always reminds me of the power of people, especially when we come together, and our capacity to antidote our fear and our isolation by expanding our hearts and our minds to all the love that exists around us, to choose community, to embrace folks for who and where they are and to celebrate what shines between us all.
So, welcome to our party—it’s full of big questions, but there will be drag and animals and the love and laughter of the community we’ve built making this production, and we (cordially) invite you into that embrace for the next couple hours and beyond.
(Also, I love you, Mom and Baba.)
—Zi Alikhan