spread the love

When I first began to work on The Laramie Project, it did not really occur to me that this was more than just a piece of theater for entertainment. This script depicts humanity, in the strongest way, through text; real life quotes from real life people for real life people. From my perspective, everyone in the cast and crew has been respecting and appreciating the characters they are playing or listening to. People have done research on their characters backgrounds, discovering simple things, even down to the kind of jacket their character, the human they are portraying, would and does wear. This is not like anything I have ever done before, and I believe that most of the cast and crew would agree with me…character backgrounds on people who actually exist. We don’t even know these people who the cast is portraying. The most we know about them is from the tiny descriptions the text supplies, as well as the words they spoke that were chosen to be put into the script. We can do extensive research through search engines or Wikipedia, but we will never really know these people. Yet, the effort that the cast is making to portray these strangers is incredible to observe. Imagine if we all made the effort to get to know each other for who we are, and not define each other with short descriptions told by somebody else. We have been taking the time to learn the ins and outs of the characters, who are actually people; learning how they tick, what makes them tick, where they come from, what they come from, why they say things, how they say things. What if we did this with the people we meet on a regular basis? Well we would go crazy, but I am taking a vow to always keep this in the back of my mind—taking even just a minute, to maybe, consider what someone is going through. You never really know what someone is enduring, whether it be in a particular minute, hour, day, week, year, or anything further, in the past, present or future. I promise to smile at more people, to talk to more people, ask them how they are. In the end, we are all each other has. If you throw away our surroundings and our materials, it comes down to humanity and there is nothing better than trusting each other. The first step to doing that is being honest and faithful, so I will make an effort to do that myself. I will allow myself to be vulnerable and take initiative when it comes to interacting with others. Even though it is a feeling that could never be explained, love is something that should always be exchanging, through a glance, a hug, a smile, a kiss, a conversation. I just looked up the definition of Love on dictionary.com. There were many definitions, but this one stood out to me the most: Love: affectionate concern for the well-being of others. Is that all it takes? Spread the love .
Daria Feneis, Stage Manager