Director's Note,
I read this show my freshman year of college and absolutely fell in love. The play reminded me of when I was around 16 years old, and how I would read very dramatic plays in my theatre classes and think about how beautiful it was to suffer. As a teenager living in suburban Texas, I hadn’t had much experience with tragedy, but anytime I would get a bad grade on a test or start to feel angsty about what I wanted to do with my life, you’d better believe you could catch me gazing romantically out of windows and blaring sad music, trying to capture some of that beautiful suffering that people wrote about. Since then I’ve had to deal with my fair share of suffering, and it was definitely not as pleasant and romantic as I hoped it would be. In fact, suffering sucks. Tilly’s experience in the play of having all of her friends romanticize her sadness while she is the one left to deal with the pain reminds me so much of my younger self. Even Tilly herself has trouble deciding how she feels about her melancholy, whether it’s something that she wants to indulge in or something that she wants to fix. Truthfully, I’ve never identified with a character as much as I identify with Tilly for how she feels things in extremes, loves so quickly, deeply, and passionately, and can’t quite figure out how she feels about her own emotions. In our current society where countless people deal with depression as countless more trivialize their struggle, I love this play for its lighthearted humor that still asks very poignant questions about how we feel about sadness and explores the distinction between normal sadness and serious depression.
Thank you so much for coming to see this show, lovely audience members. Your support means the world, and we couldn’t do this without you. I sincerely hope that:
- You can find something to identify with as strongly as I have while having a couple of
laughs along with it.
- You never travel to an almond state.
- If you do find yourself in an almond state, that you are surrounded by wonderful friends that can lift you up and help you rejoin the world.
