The other day Troy was heading to rehearsal down on E. 4th Street, approximately one hour by subway train  from our apartment, carrying a ridiculous amount of children’s play mats and climbers for the last scene of our play.  I was an hour behind him with the rest of the play mats, all of our sound equipment, six cold beers and some homemade chocolate chip cookies.  Anyway, Troy was exhausted as he walked down the hot and crowded East Village streets when he noticed a group of fellow tired people carrying absurd amounts of objects out of a small theatre.  He shouted to them with a slight edge to his voice, “FRINGE?” and they answered with equally edgy voices, “YES.”  And then they sort of gestured with their various baggage as if making a toast.  Because any theatre person in New York who has ever survived the Fringe Festival knows we must stick together.  This is not for the faint of heart.  This is not for people who don’t like carrying heavy things from one end of the city to, say, the other.  This is for New Yorkers, God help us.

While the Fringe Festival is extremely hard work and hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the experience of putting our play on its feet has been unbelievably joyful for the two of us.  It’s all the other stuff that’s making us crazy.  The details of producing a play have not been easy, and it’s felt almost impossible to maintain a normal kind of family life for Huck.   We don’t know if our play will have a life after the Fringe, but we have hopes.  Hopes that someone else will be the producer and we can just be the playwrights and actor.

During rehearsal the other day I was listening to the words Troy and I wrote and our buddy Dusty Brown’s beautiful music, and I was struck by what a collaborative project this has been for us.  THE BALAD OF RUSTY AND ROY wouldn’t exist without Dusty’s songs, which he generously gave and allowed us to create a story around.  The story wouldn’t exist without the childhood Troy was given.  What started as a ten minute scene has grown into a 90 minute piece of theatre thanks to our director Shana and her husband John (two of our closest friends) telling us we had an actual play on our hands and should keep writing.  The play couldn’t have been written without the encouragement of a bunch of other friends who gathered to hear it read and sung aloud at different stages of the writing process over the past year (like Valentino’s mommy Enid and Gus’ daddy Mark and Hannah’s daddy Greg and Ander’s parents Tanya and Alf and our friends Russell, Chad and Dawn).  We couldn’t be producing it right now without the unbelievable financial support of family and friends who enthusiastically raised us $3000.  And I couldn’t be attending rehearsals and doing rewrites if not for our incredible community of neighborhood friends who have invited Huck over for play dates (Jacob’s and Olive’s and Parker’s and Luca’s mommies).  The sound design and all the equipment has been generously donated to us by Parker’s daddy Shannon!  Lily’s daddy Jeff is leaving his vacation early to do our lights!  Luca’s mommy’s cousin is our authorized company representative! Noah and Lily’s daddy (and my brother in-law Nathan) made us a website! I’ve always loved theatre because of its collaborative nature (and resisted its competitive side), and this whole experience has been one big group effort.  It’s like a community put this play together.  After all these years of being on a theatre hiatus, this is blowing our minds a little bit.

And I wish you could all come see Troy on stage again.