With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame—George Eliot
Another confrontation with the past happened this weekend in West Palm Beach; I was there to participate in a talk-back after a reading of a 1986 play called Rob, Robin, Roberta. The writer was Dan Seymour, a man I loved and lived with until 1989; the reading was an experiment, an opportunity to see if his words and characters retained the potency to enthrall an audience.
At the Kravis Center on Friday night the smart, stimulating audience had much to say about what they saw, some of it good, some, well, not. I’d come to share aspects of his life and work (for instance, Margaret Colin, currently of Gossip Girl, originally played the title role), but wound up learning a little more from the galvanized cast of three actors who’d re-energized the piece through the filter of their own experience. As Julie Gilbert (the organizer of the event and his literary executor) said in a reflective moment, it was a celebration—of a talent that would go on to refine itself in subsequent full-length and one-act plays (finally culminating in an L.A. production of his work, A-Bomb Beauties) but also a nod to our salad days, a rite of passage no fresh faced newbie who lands on the isle of Manhattan escapes.
Today is the anniversary of his 1993 death from AIDS at the age of 38. A toast to my ex, my pal, and to those who, in their pursuit of art, hit and miss daily but never stop trying. Salut.