B’reishit: In the Beginning…

This week in the Jewish calendar, having unscrolled and read the whole Torah throughout the year, we come again to rewrap it all the way back to the beginning to read the very first word: B’reishit, “In the beginning.”

We’ve come to the end of something, and we wind it back to the beginning to start again.

I can’t think of a more appropriate coincidence and parallel for my own life.

Yesterday afternoon, Addams Family The Musical closed to a full house, once again. We said our final jokes, we emphasized things a little more. We cried at that one “Happy/Sad” song that reminds us that most things in life are a little of both. And when the final bows were over and the final patrons thanked, we came back to the dressing room for the last time, finally and pleasingly and thank god-ingly taking off our sweat-soaked costumes. The last time getting someone to help me un-pin the dress, the last time taking off the long and elaborate and hot wig, the last time returning my mic pack to the sound designer.

And when this was all done, and most of the makeup had been removed from our faces…

We began tearing down the set. The set that only a handful of weeks ago we’d built, and painted, and staged, and seen evolve right before our eyes. The same stage that only a few weeks before that, we’d all stood on for auditions in the remnants of the set from the previous show.

And now, here we were, making this, our set “the remnants of a previous show.”

Because To Kill a Mockingbird opens in 4 weeks.

I asked some of the old-timers if they got a little wistful breaking down something that was like another character in the show, if it was sad to have put it all up, just to take it all down? And each of them said, No. It’s part of the gig. They’re used to it. To the turn-over, to the letting go.

I’m not, yet! It was happy/sad for sure. It will be strange tonight to come to the theater for Mockingbird rehearsal and see the bones of our Addams set on the stage, picked clean of the character we’d built. And yet, if this isn’t a great lesson in the constant ebb and flow, creation and destruction, then I don’t know what is.

In the beginning, we were tentative and perhaps shy, getting used to one another’s personalities, contributions, moods.

In the beginning, we created something out of nothing, out of a few words and notes on a page, sitting in a small room with a piano, laughing a little, tense a little.

In the beginning, we didn’t know about the tech problems or the extra rehearsals. We didn’t know the petty arguments we’d have, or the number of times we’d have to control rolling our eyes.

In the beginning, we didn’t know the kind of joy and laughter we’d create on-stage or back-stage. We didn’t know the relationships we’d form, and the singular role each member of the cast and crew would take. We didn’t know that we’d come to love each other.

And now that we’ve unscrolled to the end, and we’re about to bring it all back to the beginning again, I am sure that we have learned something, something critical to the nature of life and love and joy and experience, that we didn’t know we would and that will carry us forward as we start once more with new words and notes and castmates.

In the beginning, we were strangers. We’ll never be that way again.