“Maybe everybody knows what this is like.”
When you look at two parallel lines, you see how they never touch. They’re symmetrical. Bookends. Parallel lines across a road signal us to stop moving and wait for a train to go by. Parallel lines across a sheet of music denote a grand pause in sound. Parallel lines draw focus to two ends that are similar, but opposite, the same, yet different.
In Middletown, you’ll witness a birth, and a death, but it's not about either of those things. There’s an act of cruelty and an act of kindness, but that's not the point. We’ll talk about traveling and staying home, about the earth and the heavens, about facts and questions, about the Great Things and the everyday, the mundane and the sublime, the subatomic and the extraterrestrial, about you and me, but this play lives in between of all of that. While it seems like these parallels capture our experience of life, there is still something missing.
When we look at parallel lines, what is hardly noticed is what’s in between the lines, the blank space on the page between two strokes of ink. Middletown captures that space, where the parallel lines are the birth and death, that empty space is life. Living, breathing, growing life.
Upon your arrival at Middletown, you will encounter a tour guide who has never traveled, and tourists who have been across the world. Maybe you’ll meet a man who just wants to be normal and another man who wants to be anything but. There’s someone floating in space, juxtaposed with someone stuck behind a desk. You might find a woman starting a family who is incredibly lonely, and a girl who is perfectly content with nothing. There is someone who is planting new life and someone who is grieving. Someone who is looking for the answers, and someone who can share them with us.
If you look past your expectations of who these people are, you might notice you know a Librarian, or that you are a Mechanic. You might realize that there is a lot about life and people that you do not yet know, and might never know, for that matter.
Our world is full of dichotomies, and with almost everything in life, you can’t have one side without the other. Yet, when we let go of this idea that’s so deeply rooted within us, we can find that despite the uniquenesses that separate us, we have unity in being breathers. We have unity in our need for acceptance, joy, and love. We can only connect with each other in the space in between, in the regular, everyday life.
We’d like to invite you to take a chance to recognize that there is more, and there is also less. That nothing is just and everything is also. We’d like to invite you to Unwind, Unknow, and find the peace and joy that’s in between.
- Anna Leigh Convery, Dramaturg
