arrival after all. I’d instructed Seth to run through his final monologue, just so we could get a sense of it, and I’d asked him to make sure he put some feeling into it—which sounded like good advice from a play director, but this play director had no idea what she was talking about.
Seth, however, apparently did. He walked through an imaginary curtain from the back of the stage and began his speech. “God creates us free, free to be selfish, but he adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in the world, and that mechanism is called suffering. To put it another way, pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
The other actors scattered around the room quieted and turned toward the stage, where Seth was taking a deep breath, eyes closed, before going on.
Meagan said, “He’s doing good,” from the chair beside mine and I nodded. He certainly was.
“Why must it be pain? Why can’t he wake us more gently, with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be awakened is the dream that all is well. All is not well. Believe me, all is not well.” He took another breath, and there was something ragged in the sound this time. A muscle contracted in his jaw as he seemed to brace himself before continuing, his eyes at once haunted and luminous. “Suffering . . . by suffering . . . through suffering, we release our hold on the toys of this world, and know that our true good lies in another world. But after we have suffered so much, must we still suffer more? And more? And more?”
I was entranced. A herd of tutu-wearing elephants could have pranced through the auditorium just then, and I don’t think any of us would have paid them much attention. Because Seth—Seth who couldn’t hold Kate’s hand without turning five shades of red, Seth who never joined the other guys in stress-relieving rumbles during breaks between scenes, Seth who avoided looking me in the eye at all costs out of excessive timidity or guilt or who-knew-what—that same Seth was standing on the stage reciting his lines with tears dripping off his chin onto his chest. Much like the day I’d first met Shayla, I realized at that moment how deeply I loved him. Mind you, I wasn’t planning on officially adding him to my already-complex pseudo-family, but oh, how I loved this giant man-boy whose sensitivity and talent were so far beyond his years.
Shayla was with me at rehearsal that night because Bev had a commitment elsewhere, so I didn’t have much time afterward to debrief with my young actor. But Seth and I did sit for a few minutes in the last row of the auditorium after the others had gone outside.
“Tell me about the monologue, Seth.”
He shrugged and looked away, apparently enthralled by the white wall off to his right. He’d been a little shaken for the rest of the rehearsal, probably as much because of his emotional display as because of the reaction of his peers. They had walked around the auditorium for the remainder of the evening like pilgrims in a holy place—speaking in whispers, their eyes a little wide, their faces serene. And since it had seemed we’d reached something of a pinnacle, I’d called off the rehearsal a half hour early. Now the other actors were outside engaged in some rip-roarin’ game that had the boys screaming, the girls squealing, and the neighbors probably calling the police to complain about the noise. But I could hear Shayla’s high voice among all the others—I’d developed mom ears somewhere along the way—and I knew it meant she’d be tired early tonight, so I didn’t do anything to intervene.
“Was it the text you were saying?” I asked Seth. “Or is there something going on in your life that makes it hard for you to be a part of the play?”
“I . . . I used to have this . . . this thing,” he said. “And the lines I have to say are . . . Well, they mean a lot to me, I guess.”
I wasn’t sure how to proceed. He was clearly still in a vulnerable state of mind, and I didn’t know whether further questions would help or harm him. “What do you mean by ‘this thing’?” I asked, giving him the chance to elaborate or be succinct.