Passion Play: A Personal Connection

To start off this production blog for Passion Play, I thought I'd post what I wrote for my Director's Note in the program. I love almost everything about this play, but there's definitely a personal emotional connection for me in P's story in the third part:

There were four of us who were best friends through college, and Johnny was the funny one. He had a quick wit and a foul mouth and a sensitive side that he only let show when it would get him something. He and I talked deeply about life more times than I can remember, and then he would end it by saying something crass. He stood up in my wedding; I was best man and played piano in his.

We fell out of touch after college, the way people did in the days before Facebook was a thing. I would hear that he was living with his wife and kid by the Gulf, then up in Michigan, then down in New Orleans, then back home in West Texas. Then, out of nowhere, I hear that Johnny’s joining the Army.

 

I couldn’t understand it. I mean, he was 30 years old and there were TWO wars going on. I talked to him on the phone for the first time in years, and he told me that he needed this. He’d been unable to hold down a job, and he needed something that he had to commit to for four years, so he could provide for his family. Plus, he told me, they said he’d go into advanced officer training after boot camp. He wouldn’t be deployable for another year. And even if he was deployed, he’d have a “Green Zone” job, he wouldn’t be kicking in doors. And there would be extra pay for being overseas, hazard pay, combat pay…

Sometime later, I found out that Johnny was home from Afghanistan, having been discharged with a Purple Heart and severe post-traumatic stress syndrome, and that he and his wife were getting a divorce. To hear him tell it, she told him she was leaving the day his best friend got his guts blown out in front of him; to hear her side, he went to war an unstable man and came back as something she could no longer recognize or deal with. Turns out he saw combat after all, despite what he’d been told. Or, should I say, sold?

We would talk every once in a while after he got back. He hatched some hair-brained scheme to start a business promoting artists. He signed me up as one of his represented playwrights; we did a contract and everything. Of course, nothing ever came of it. In the last email he sent me, he outright told me he was a shell of a man. His body had been wrecked by the seemingly impossible number of medications he had to take every day, and he basically lived in his apartment like a hermit. That’s if you can trust the way Johnny tells it. Trustworthiness was never Johnny’s strong-suit.

He told me he was ceding all of his old friends to his ex-wife, that it was too painful to have reminders. He was just going to separate himself from the world now that he was, as he put it with characteristic sarcasm, “f**king crazy”. He had a blog where he posted some poems. I’ve read them, and they’re good. They’re heartbreaking, but maybe only to someone who knew him long ago.

I recently saw a video online where a poet talked about his difficulties with religion. He said that ideally, religion isn’t “a museum for good people, it’s a hospital for the broken”. I’d like to have more of that kind of religion in our world – the religion of the broken, the religion where we take care of each other.

I’d like to dedicate my participation in this production to Johnny, and to all the others who got lost along the way.