Hamlet

I come back to the theater

After a few years away

And this woman’s running thing

Which is fine

I’m fine with women

But this woman looks at me

And suddenly I’m her enemy

Because she’s got a Board full of men

Turned against her

Because the theater’s turning in awful numbers

And she’s got every guy in the acting company

Offering to take her job from her

So she sees me

And she thinks

Great

One more man

I gotta worry about

She tosses me Laertes in Hamlet

Because the Board remembers me

And likes me

Hell, everybody liked me

I was a pretty decent guy

And when the show was over

So was the thirty-eighth season

And so was her job

I see her cleaning out her office

And I offer to buy her a drink

She says ‘What the hell’

And we go get a drink

Three hours later

We’re back at my place

Screwing like two people

Who’ve just been told

They’ve got ten minutes to live

It was an interesting experience

Afterwards, we were sitting on my balcony

Wrapped up in bedsheets

Starting at this fucked up little town

And I said—

‘Let’s get out of here’

She was about to say a thousand things

And instead she just said ‘Yes’

We moved to New York

We were there that Fall

On the eleventh

When all of a sudden

All of our spontaneous plans seemed…

Well, spontaneity in general started to look…pointless

And as a mover

I like to move

And when you can’t move anymore

You think, Well, I might as well

Go back where I started

So I went back to the Orpheus

And Cara stayed where she was

I haven’t talked to her in ten years

I still act

But mostly I build

Sets and shit

So why am I telling you all this?

I don’t fucking know

We all came here

To get something off our chests, right?

Either about the Orpheus or the acting company

Or about theater in general

Why we do all this

Sometimes I look back and I mark time

Using shows

It’s not ‘That’s when I moved home’

Or ‘That’s when I met Cara’

Or ‘That’s when the planes hit the building’

Or ‘That’s when I became a fucking coward’

It’s ‘That’s when we did Hamlet’

It’s so easy to move from one show to the next

And pretend you don’t notice

That your whole life is going by, you know?

Take this job

Take that job

And pretty soon

You’re at some party

Talking all about the past

And thinking it wasn’t so long ago

When it really was

Where’d it all go, you know?

Where did

Everything

Go?