The lights in the theater were off save the lonely ghost light on stage, a faded glimmer of withered hope. I ushered myself, in the dark, to one of the worn red chairs that were forever going to be replaced, sat down and stared ahead. I was all at once completely calm for the first time in several months. Time stops sitting in a darkened theater, a place where I have spent a considerable portion of my adult life. I waited.

Ten weeks earlier Dan, Julia and I stood together, heads bowed, in shocked silence as Dan, Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s technical director, who rarely spoke unless spoken to, confided that the theater was closing. Although the three of us almost never convened, no words seemed appropriate to the moment.

For two years I heard suggestions that the theater was on the brink of closure. Warned often that we couldn’t know if we would still be open in three weeks, I remained in a semi-chosen state of disbelief. I comforted myself with the notion that theatre life is always on the edge, he next big upswing surely just around the corner. It was a hopeful thought contradicted only by the ever-increasing hunch to my shoulders.

Sitting in the still theatre I breathed slowly and deliberately, trying to fully absorb the profundity of the moment. Amidst the quiet I could hear barely audible murmurs of excitement. The buzz of anticipation swirling up and over every seat coming at me from several directions to which I could find no response and, at the point of no return, I carefully made my way in the dark down the stairs, out of the theater and back into the daylight of the lobby.

I just checked my email messages for the ninth time in an hour. I’m desperately seeking something to hold onto. Something like a proverbial life raft that will save me from drowning in a sea of inexhaustible memories. I, with resigned helplessness, realize a loss, is a loss. The only thing I can do right now is exist in the void I find myself in until I can reemerge, soul intact. There is nothing to hold onto. I’m reminded of the apt phrase written on the “Tony wall” at the closing night party “well, that happened”.

I am trying to whittle thirty years down to the five or six costumes Kelly, the building administrator, told me we could put into the University of Minnesota’s archive. It’s a seemingly impossible task. For three months, two or three times a week, I have scavenged through the theater’s cavernous costume storage. Armed with one lowly trouble light I’ve painstakingly searched through many cubicles filled with thousands of costumes, each piece a representation of some part of Jeune Lune’s illustrious history, now lifeless testimonials to years of more successes than failures.

The sharp pain on the left side of my neck is a nagging reminder of the weight I am bearing. I am filled with constant anxiety that sometimes makes it hard to stay asleep in the morning. I’m worried about the most relevant costumes in Jeune Lune’s history disappearing before they reach the archives. Even though I rationally know only a few trustworthy souls have keys to costume storage, costumes have disappeared before. Evidence of their existence remaining solely on the shelf of archival photographs. I needlessly chide myself for my inattention to documenting my work over the years.

I never leave my apartment, the theater, or my car without transporting large volumes of costumes, bags of stuff, furniture, dress forms, notebooks or anything else that needs to be assigned a final resting place. I’m a refugee in hasty exile to the solitude of my apartment where I quietly try to make sense of it all. My living space, which acts as a funnel for the theater’s retired articles, some days, feels like a brief rest stop on the highway to insanity.

Once the closure was announced the theatre began to physically dwindle. The computers were removed; cords left dangling, like remnants from a hurried surgical procedure. The machine started winding down towards its last gasp. Miscellany started to pile up in corners of the office. Desks were emptied one by one. Boxes of what at one time seemed crucial were left standing, strewn carelessly open on tabletops. Photographs taken at various stages seemed to be scattered everywhere; tiny emotional mines that could propel me in any direction. On my bad days I walked through the office with eyes fixed straight ahead.

I went to the closing ceremony because I wanted to “officially” end my sojourn at Jeune Lune; to say good-bye to the building and all of the people who made it possible. It was a mature ideal that found little salvation in reality.
For the party, the theatre was emptied; red chairs stacked high in one corner. Around the periphery were piled a few, oversized props, for silent auction. Since most of the lighting equipment had been sold, there was no ambiance. The theater never looked sadder. Easily one hundred people were milling about but there was no longer any life there.

Tense and unsure of what to say or how to react, many people said the wrong thing. For most of the evening I self medicated with a conversation in my head. The numb, confused state it left me in was temporarily intoxicating. I eventually came down and sadly realized there’s just no getting around a loss. You have to move through it.

Stuffy the clown, the theater’s gigantic unofficial mascot, was thrown off the roof just before 11 p.m. in a macabre last ritual that perfectly and flatly punctuated the senselessness of the last few years’ chain of events. The thud as he hit the sidewalk in front of the theater was a communal sound that could have been any one of us.

At precisely eleven o’clock Kelly Schaub, the building administrator, made a toast in the lobby. As she raised her glass I reluctantly scanned the emotional landscape before me. Montages of the peaks and valleys, and of course the tourists. I started to retreat into myself again until my brother gently touched my arm.
“I’m done”, I said.

Then with the only bit of inertia I could muster I walked, looking straight ahead, through the lobby, out the door and into the blurred, frigid air.