Take a bow.

I went to a Broadway play the other night, and happened to have seats in the very front row, and I realized at the end of the peformance that perhaps my favorite part of going to the show that night was the curtain call.

It's not that the play wasn't any good; in fact, it was quite good. But there was something about the actors coming out at the end -- it's that moment that makes the dramatic experience of the theater the most different from one in any other medium. You get to see the actors not as their characters, but as themselves, and for a minute or so, the set they've just performed on, the costumes they're wearing, all cease to become the world of the play and become...a set. And costumes. And the characters become people. Different people than they were as you watched them for two hours prior. It's kind of surreal and kind of great.

I read an article about playwrights who write for television -- and I know a bunch personally -- and in the article, Marsha Norman, a fancy, fancy, successful playwright, talked about how playwrights are gravitating toward TV because that's where the audience is; that's where their stories really get out to the people. (That, and -- let's be honest -- the fact that they can make a year's salary writing a single hour-long episode.)

Reading that article made me think about my experience with the curtain call the other night. That undeniable, intangible magic of watching live theater. And maybe it's because I'm a musical theater writer, and so probably am not gonna be writing for Law & Order anytime soon, but there really is no other place than the theater that I'd like to be.

And believe you me, it's hard to explain why. I went to theater school with lots of theater people, and as the gap widens between the time I graduated and the present, more and more of my friends leave the theater for more lucrative climes: television, law, accounting, you name it. I'm fast becoming the stalwart of my former classmates who's still doing the theater thing. And the thing is, I've honestly never had one second where I didn't think theater was the place for me.

I can't explain this feeling at all, except in some cheesy, abstract musing about a Broadway curtain call, but maybe that inexplicability (did I just make up that word?) is the very reason I know I'm doing the right thing. I could easily explicate a multitude of reasons why any rational person would abandon the theater, but I'm not swayed by a single one.

This is not to say they're aren't days when I'm down with the I'm-In-Theater blues. But somehow, I sit at the piano and start to write, and I can't imagine doing anything else.