I wanna hold your hand.

So, last week I was out at Penn State University, for a workshop production of my musical Ordinary Days. It was staged in this gem of a space, a former cow-showing palace (I know, how fantastic!) converted into this great thrust stage. For the non-theater readers, a thrust stage is one that has audience on three sides, so from the audience, you can look out and see other audience members across from you as well.

The other tidbit to know for this story is that the penultimate song in Ordinary Days is a song called "I'll Be Here," which is a bit of an emotional doozy, especially in the context of the entire show.

So, during a talkback after one of the performances, a girl raised her hand and said (and I'm paraphrasing here), "This is going to sound cheesy, but after 'I'll Be Here,' I looked out at the audience and so many people were touching -- arms across shoulders, leaning together, holding hands -- and, I thought, that's the reason we do theater."

And, sentimental fool that I am, I didn't find that cheesy. I thought it was cool.

My friend and collaborator Sarah has a great story about her favorite theater experience. It was a play staged in a barn in Iowa in the middle of the winter, and each audience member was given a foil-wrapped baked potato to hold, to keep their hands warm.

What makes Sarah's story so great is that it's simply a physicalization of what can happen in theater. We get a little gift to hold in our hand and keep us warm.

The thing that struck me about that particular performance of Ordinary Days was the tangible sense of communion that can only happen in live theater. That, somehow, an invisible hand reaches through space and across time from the pages of a script, through a group of actors and into an audience. There was a particular confluence of events, a layering of awarenesses, that made the communal energy of that performance especially potent -- that the audience was largely friends, teachers, and colleagues of the student actors, and that somehow the real lives of the students, their backstories and their dreams, intersected with those of the characters they were playing. So the audience was really watching these real lives, filtered (if you will) through the Pantone-hued gel of these fictional lives. And I guess fiction is reflective, so this fiction-coated reality shone back like a little mirror on the lives of the audience members.

It's neat that theater does that. That it lives and breathes, literally, right in front of you. That we come together physically in the making of it and the watching of it. It's like the girl said in the talkback, it's why we do it. It's why I make it, why I go see it. In its best moments, it guides us out of our lives and into another world, but there is an invisible hand, as warm and comforting as a baked potato, that leads everything back to ourselves. And somehow, after being touched by that hand, we aren't quite the same as we were before.