Auditions: strangers.
Closing night: siblings.
Strike: bitter custody battle where no one gets the good prop sword.
That’s the cycle. Every show. Every time.
The judge rules:
- One actor takes the fake mustache.
- One actor takes the inside joke about the raccoon in the orchestra pit.
- Everyone takes trauma.
Act I: The Rehearsal Cult
You don’t join a cast. You’re abducted.
Script in hand.
Eyes wide.
Someone already humming warm-ups like a Gregorian monk who overdosed on LaCroix.
Day One: Hi, nice to meet you, I’ll be fake-marrying you on stage.
Day Three: someone cries in the bathroom stall because they missed a cue.
Day Seven: half the cast is calling the director “Mom” and the other half “Dictator.”
By Week One, personal space is dead.
By Week Two, someone is braiding your hair.
By Week Three, you’ve seen your castmate’s Spanx situation and said nothing.
By Week Four, you’ve eaten an Oreo someone dropped on the dressing room floor. And you called it communion.
Act II: The Panic Bonds
Normal families bond over vacations.
Cast families bond over disasters.
The fog machine that went rogue.
The quick-change that revealed more than Equity rules allow.
The sword fight that looked less “Shakespeare” and more “drunk fencing class at the YMCA.”
Can you hit the high note?
Can you cover the missed entrance?
Can you pretend you don’t smell fear and Axe body spray backstage?
Trust forms faster when the alternative is public humiliation under a spotlight.
Do you survive? Yes.
Do you laugh about it later? Also yes.
Do you secretly wish the ladder incident was immortalized in the Library of Congress? Absolutely.
Act III: The Closing Night Funeral
Applause.
Flowers.
The one cast member ugly-crying so hard it looks like performance art.
And then: strike.
Forty-five minutes of erasure.
Your world – your entire fake reality – stuffed into a dumpster and driven off in a borrowed Ford F-150.
It’s not stagecraft.
It’s exorcism.
Act IV: The Afterimage Family
Here’s the trick: it doesn’t end.
Years later, you’ll be haunted.
By a laugh in a grocery store that sounds exactly like your fake brother.
By a hairspray aisle in Walgreens that smells like tech week despair.
By the text that simply says, “Remember the ladder?”
These are not memories.
These are hauntings.
And they do not let go.
Act V: Why We Keep Coming Back
It’s not for the stipend (You get a stipend???).
It’s not for the costumes that smell like damp soup.
It’s not even for the applause, though applause is nice and cheaper than therapy.
We come back because the family is temporary but the echoes are eternal.
Because laughter in a greenroom is louder than grief in real life.
Because strangers can become siblings faster than science says is possible.
Theatre doesn’t give you forever.
It gives you echoes.
And sometimes, the echoes are funnier, sadder, and more human than the show ever was.
Finale:
(Lights out.
The family disperses.
But listen closely –
somewhere, faintly, they’re still laughing.
And it’s louder than the applause.)
Brian Brijbag 