Leaving Brigadoon.

Last day in California. 

Leaving Brigadoon. 

And I am thrilled to report: I do not leave hollowed out, but brimming with fullness.

I have spent more than two years orienting my life around these specific six weeks. Not merely writing toward them, but living toward them. Making decisions with one question in mind: ‘when this moment comes, will I be able to be fully present for it?’ 

And somehow—miraculously—I was.

This has been, in every possible way, the richest artistic experience of my life. There is something impossible and sacred about watching a thing that lived only in your imagination for years suddenly live, expand, breathe. To hear people speak words (and play the silences) that once existed only in your own skull (while you were wearing sweatpants and eating shredded cheese directly from the bag) is both deeply disorienting and impossibly moving.

But more than the production itself, I am carrying the people.
 

Katie Spelman—my whyfe and artistic soulmate. To make work with someone whose instincts feel braided into your own is one of life’s great privileges. And to share leadership with so many extraordinary women on this production felt quietly revolutionary.

 

What stunned me most was not that the work reached a high standard — it was how we reached it. This is a standout professional experience of my life where not one single sliver of my integrity had to be traded at the door. Nobody had to become cruel to become excellent. Nobody had to be diminished to make the room efficient. Nobody had to pretend exhaustion was virtue or disrespect was rigor. We worked hard—God, did we bleed and sweat—but we worked with kindness, curiosity, accountability, humor, compassion, and deep respect for one another’s humanity. 

For years I quietly accepted the mythology that great art must emerge from suffering, ego, fear, hierarchy, and collateral damage. This experience cracked that belief open. Excellence and gentleness are not enemies. Integrity is not naïveté. Respect is not the opposite of ambition. Sometimes the highest standard is reached not despite love—but because of it. 

And then there is the thing I can hardly write without crying: I was healthy. For the first time since 2014, I moved through an entire artistic process physically healthy, and surrounded in love, healthy relationships, and true support. That is absolute life. 

I do not take my health lightly. There is an Italian saying: "a healthy person has many wishes; an unhealthy person has only one." For thirteen years I have understood that wish in my bones. Illness narrows the horizon. It shrinks life into appointments and endurance and bargaining and becoming very acquainted with pain and loss and the undignified shadows of human existence, not to mention the particular acoustics of hospital waiting rooms. I think I stopped dreaming for a while there. Perhaps that is the “only one” wish part of the saying. Dreaming began to feel arrogant. I hoped smaller. 
So to arrive here—to this enormous artistic undertaking—and find myself not surviving but actually living inside it? I do not have language for that gift. Health did not solve every problem. I still over-packed emotionally and literally. But health gave me something I had not realized I lost: appetite (in every sense). Curiosity. Ambition. Permission to imagine a future. I do not take my second chance lightly. I intend to use every inch of it.

 

We are nothing without our health, and hollow without a community to uplift us in bounty and in storms. 

I fought for life. I changed my existence consciously choosing life rather than merely allowing it to continue. I was given a second chance and I endeavor every day to make it worthwhile. And as a result of that hard-won gift, two years ago I made a promise to myself: if the work did not nourish me, if it did not feel good, I would stop saying 'yes.' Some of that journey has been chronicled here. The current conclusion? 

Turns out: we do not have to suffer for our art.

I got to do the work I love while healthy, with my mother nearby, and Alec—my great love and world-class hype man—cheering from the front row of my life.

One of the strangest and quietest lessons of this experience had nothing to do with theatre and everything to do with allowing myself to be loved. I don’t think I realized until late last year how much of my life i have spent “bracing.” Not-quite-exhaling. Priding myself on being capable, independent, “low maintenance” and “not having needs” thank you so much. Which sounds noble until you realize sometimes independence is just fear in a trench coat. Hyper-vigilance with good posture. I did not realize how exhausted I was from holding myself upright until people began offering to hold me too. Alec, more than anyone, taught me this. He has loved me not as a reward for competence but as an invitation to rest. 
And then there were the friends—artists who read drafts, gave notes, solved problems, made calls, and friends who crossed oceans and time zones and spent money and energy simply to sit in the dark and say: I see you. I am in awe of that kind of love. I don’t think I understood how much courage it takes to receive support. More courage, perhaps, than to do everything alone.

Now I hand this beautiful show to its gorgeous, gifted, deeply feeling company and move toward the next horizon. But part of me will always live in this, first ever Brigadoon.

So. If this chapter taught me anything, it’s this:

More.

More joy.
More courage.

More community.
More women.
More art that feels like coming home.

Slàinte. 

 

exactly how I feel...