Maybe That’s The Plot

The lights are dim, darkness firmly settled over the sea of people dotting the rows of seats. The air is thick. The oxygen has been sucked clean from the velvet, cathedral-esque space with everyone holding their breath. Though, they are, likely, blithely unaware that they are holding their breath. Such is the magic of theatres; shoulder to shoulder with a group of strangers, you enter a different world for a couple of hours and forget the pesky needs of the world in which you live.

A silhouette moves stealthily upstage right. Downstage left, a man bears his soul, the vibrations of his voice bouncing off of every surrounding wall. An arm raise. A swift turn. An unnatural pop. An empty thud. A silent roll. And from that sea of people, a strangled, warbled expelling and intaking of breath all in one.

I watch as every one of those dots hinges forward until the entire audience creates a rippling wave. An instinct; a reaction; a physical need to lean into what they just witnessed.

It was my fifth time, perhaps, seeing The Great Gatsby. When your best friend is on Broadway, you go—and go, and go, as much as you can, because such a season of life where you get to say, “My best friend is on Broadway!” is rare and beautiful and perfect. And when the show is as all-encompassing and dazzling as The Great Gatsby, there is no burden in returning to its world. There’s no such thing as seeing the same show twice when it’s live theatre, anyway.

So there I was, in the upper mezzanine this time, watching the audience watch Gatsby’s tragic end. He’d be resurrected in a few hours’ time for the evening show, but in that moment—in the moment of the pop and the thud and the roll—someone uttering such a notion to this now-grieving audience would have been deemed biblically prophetic rather than well-versed in the realities of fictional performance. Maybe it was because I knew the shocking moment was coming—and thus I was keenly aware of its shock value—or maybe it was because being seated at a higher vantage point gave me an entirely new way to experience the audience in relation to the performance, but all I could focus on was this visceral lean-in. It was beautiful.

My whole life, I’ve had similar reactions in theatres—but I grew up doing theatre, experiencing it, letting it permeate every part of me. I’m used to my reactions. This performance, however, was the first time I got to see other people’s reactions and realize that, while some are in the same category as me (theatre-kid-at-core who absolutely lives to witness live performance), so many of these audience members are not. There were young children and elderly couples and every age in between. There were, undoubtedly, tourists who just wanted to see a Broadway show. There were dads who just got whatever tickets their kids wanted and young women on girls’ trips with no real affinity to one show over another. And yet, every single one of them were one of those heads that dotted the audience—the dots that collectively gasped and leaned in until they were so far forward in their seats that they were practically falling off of them.

The beautiful part was not the scope of theatregoers. It was that the only common thread amongst them was that they knowingly bought tickets to a show—they paid to watch talented people dress up, and play pretend, and tell them a story—and they suspended their disbelief enough to have a very real reaction to a very fictional death. The beautiful part was the buy-in, in every sense of the word.

Witnessing this moment added to the small idea I had been mulling over for some time in film school—an idea I, lovingly, jokingly, referred to as the Buy-In Theory. The more I thought about it, though, the more I started to think there was something to it.

A big part of film school is, unsurprisingly, talking about films: what your favorite is, why it’s your favorite, what the latest films are, if they are successful, why they are successful, etc. And something I’d noticed over the years was that people would say they disliked a film, script, or even genre because they thought it was stupid or unrealistic. As a fierce defender of the rom com genre, I heard this a lot. It got me thinking—what is more realistic about horror, or absurd comedy, or even Marvel movies that a romantic comedy doesn’t have? What makes one of these more of an, Eh, I thought it was kind of stupid, than the others? What really is the difference?

The difference, of course, was the buy-in. I did an experiment. For a while, I went into my classes with two different mindsets. Sometimes, I’d watch the films being mentally present and focused on the story. I’d follow the characters, root for them, immerse myself, in the cover of a darkened theatre, with their world. Other times, I’d sit back mentally. I’d watch the films from a distance. I’d stay firmly in the real world. I wouldn’t buy in. What I noticed was that, while of course there are films that are not well done or whose scripts fall flat, I could watch the same genre—the same wildly “unrealistic” horror or comedy or anything in between—and if I wasn’t willing to buy into it, it would always, always feel stupid, regardless of if it was well-made or well-written.

This realization was not groundbreaking; it might even be somewhat obvious that in order to enjoy any type of art we must first be willing to suspend our disbelief and let it lead us. But here’s the kicker. It’s not just with art. Everything is stupid if you’re not willing to buy into it—even your life.

Recently, when I was talking to a friend about the plights of trying to write when I had nothing interesting happening at the moment, she responded with just four words:

“Maybe that’s the plot.”

She went on to explain that, at least in the context of being just out of school, maybe the whole point is that nothing interesting happens unless you make it so. Maybe you have to actively cultivate your life in such a way that it is interesting and surprising and fun. And while she’s right, I’d take it one step further. It’s not enough to do things that make your life interesting; you have to buy into the idea that your life already is interesting.

Just like with sitting before a movie screen or stage, you have to be willing to engage with your life. You have to be willing to be led a little bit, to suspend your disbelief enough to reckon with the, Oh, and what if! thoughts. You have to be willing to buy into the idea that whatever chapter you’re in is interesting and fun and exciting because it is part of the story, and, most importantly, it’s the part of the story you’re in right now.

Being bored—finding your current stage of life uninteresting—is both a privilege and a falsity. There is nothing uninteresting about the coffee in your hand or the shirt you choose to wear or the routine of the everyday. That is, if you decide to buy into the idea that every day is interesting.

Whenever I doubt the collective human experience—the believing and grieving and hoping and feeling of it all—I think about that moment from Gatsby. I hear the gasp. I see the outlines of hundreds of people leaning forward all at once, magnetically drawn, having a wholly real reaction to a fictional story. I wonder at the remarkable repetition—tradition—over centuries that involves the ritual of purposefully standing toe to toe with fiction in order to reap the full, absolute range of human emotions from its imagined circumstances.

One of my professors once ended her lecture by saying, “That is, if you buy that.” After hours of discussing dense film theory, breaking down the meanings of sequences and cross-referencing them with decades-old ideas, she smiled, shrugged, and gave us the choice. It was ours to make. Just as it was for that audience during The Great Gatsby. That audience did not have to engage. They did not have to suspend their disbelief in that theatre, under that blanket of darkness, and get to know the characters before them. They did not have to believe and grieve and hope and feel. The choice was theirs; they decided to buy in.

Here’s the truth: every story is going to feel stupid and mediocre if you aren’t willing to buy into it, and that includes your own. It includes the work you do, the art you make, and the capacity you have to lean in when the moment calls for it. It includes the narrative you craft about your own life and all of its wonderful, sometimes mundane, but always interesting chapters. The plot itself can only do so much without someone to lean in and meet it halfway.

That is, of course, if you buy that.

(And for whatever it’s worth, I hope you do.)