Once I Say It, Then I’ve Said It

by Matthew Mastricova

The seats in Alumni Auditorium were empty, besides the ones filled by the director and a few crew members. Rehearsal was tension, a disorienting performance for people who are also performing. I did not know anyone except my partner, Noah, but the other actors knew me, if not by face then by Noah’s description of it. 

As a way to spend more time with Noah after a month of late-night rehearsals and nights spent alone in our apartment, I was helping the Broadway Haven Players conduct their first act run-through of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. The musical follows the events of the titular fictional bee, and all the characters, even the child contestants, are played by adults. The cast is traditionally small, with the nine main actors taking on a second role if their primary role is eliminated from competition in the bee. No two performances of the show are identical. Not only does the play rely heavily on ad-libbed dialogue, but the dynamics of the cast change with every performance; to fill out the bleachers where the bee contestants sit, four audience members are called up to join the show. I had volunteered to fill one of those spaces during rehearsal. On the top row of a set of risers, I sat next to Noah. They were playing Qonyr (pronounced “Connor”), a contestant who wore a shapeless zip-up hoodie and baggy jeans. An announcer described the outfit as “prepubescent Twitch-streaming son of an anti-vaxxer drag” to fill the space as Noah took to the mic to spell. I was nervous that when my name was called I would mess up even though the directions were simple: Go up to the microphone stand. Wait for my word. Ask for the definition of the word. Ask for the word to be used in a sentence. Spell the word to the best of my ability. Don’t act. 

I saw the show over a decade ago, near the end of its Broadway run. One character, a boy scout, sang a song about the poorly timed erection that led to him being eliminated. There was the chaos of “Pandemonium” as the actors gradually spread from seated orderly rows on the bleachers to flailing across the entirety of the stage in increasingly frenetic choreography—the song and the show didn’t enact time and progress as much as suggest them. Every contestant was introduced with a silly description, even the non-acting audience members. I knew I would be ejected by the end of act 1, but only because Noah warned me. I didn’t remember who won the bee.

“Matthew’s style is best described as ‘hipster Jigglypuff,’” the competition’s announcer said. Goofy and affectionate, the description was clearly written by Noah. We stanned first-generation fairy-type Pokemon, those adorable round femmes who brought glamour to the series, even if this wasn’t an accurate description that night—I was just dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. But these silly cultural riffs were fundamental to what made Noah and me a we. It was like saying, “There is no paradigm in the world to describe my love for you, so I must create a new one.” I smiled dumbly as I walked to center stage and awaited my word.

My word was “apoop”—“Apoop?” I repeated. “Apoop.” I curled my shoulders toward the imaginary microphone in front of me, marked with an X in gaffer tape on the floor. I tried to figure out if it was more natural to look into the empty seats or into the eyes of the people scattered among the first few rows. I settled on the seats and asked for the definition. I asked for the word to be used in a sentence. I did not get eliminated on apoop, so I returned, for one more round, to my place next to Noah-as-Qonyr. They too would be gone by the end of the act—only the principal characters return after intermission. 

The Broadway Haven Players were run by and for students of Columbia University’s medical campus, with some limited roles available for faculty. As Noah had graduated the previous semester and was now a faculty member, they were ineligible for those roles that returned after intermission. This was fair, but I had hoped the directors or the student board would change the rules for Noah, whose singing voice erupts from their stomach like a wave of glass, the silent tide after every belted line pulling me closer to the edge of my seat, who was previously cast with the Haven Players as Jack in Into the Woods without even a callback and Georg in Spring Awakening, crushing the multi-octave solo in “Touch Me,” that primal, wordless evocation of desire and intimacy.

While the directors didn’t break the rules, they did bend them; Noah showed up in the second act as the father of a contestant, Olive, appearing for a single song: “The I Love You Song.” The role of Olive’s father is typically given to the actor who plays the Comfort Counselor, shepherding the eliminated children offstage. It was not Noah’s only song in the show, but it was the one they cared for most. Every day, sometimes for hours, Noah would practice. I was used to the ways their music seeped into our apartment, into the pores of my body. Usually, though, the melodies were more varied, the lines longer and less likely to hit like a locked groove.

“We’re gonna have to put a curfew on rehearsing,” I told Noah on a night when their voice was still going strong at 11 p.m. and I needed to wake up in seven hours to get to my teaching job. They kept belting the same line, and even from the other room the words rang clearly: 

I love you

I love you

 I love you

I love you. 

“I didn’t realize,” they said. Their voice was soft, as if they were talking to a wounded animal. “Sorry, I’ll stop.” 

I hated myself in that moment for making them worry about me. It was not Noah’s fault that the bulk of their part in the song was repeating the same line; I should have just put on headphones, found a way to tune them out. For months I had felt like I was continuously making small mistakes: forgetting to fold the laundry or pack up leftovers or saying a line that sounded smooth in my head but grew barbs the second it left my mouth. I was waiting for the moment Noah would realize they could do better. 

We were two and some years together in this apartment—large enough to give us space but cheap enough that we could afford it, and down the block from the campus where Noah first attended school and now worked. I had spent the last year of our lives counting down the days until we could move to Brooklyn, closer to my friends and the bookstores I loved and the concerts I bought tickets for but always skipped because they were too far away. 

I was planning to not teach summer school that year—to focus instead on settling into our future apartment and writing. Then I graduated my master’s program, my student loans entered repayment, and the teacher’s salary that had felt infinite began to barely cover those monthly repayments and rent and internet and subway cards and utilities and food. I spent every night in bed worrying about how I would survive on money I no longer had while Noah slept soundly next to me. 

I decided to work summer school after all because the extra money was too tempting. We did not move to Brooklyn because our rent would increase and one of the only apartments in our price range was at the base of a cemetery so that when you looked out the window it felt like you were looking out on your own grave and Noah would be left to move us in mostly on their own, again, and they would resent me for it, because on a typical day at work I was on my feet or my knees or hunched in a hard metal chair like a goofy-ass gargoyle trying to communicate with my students and coworkers and supervisors and I would forget, again, to perform the appreciation I felt for Noah in a way that actually made them feel appreciated. I wrote nothing that summer, coming home every day exhausted and unmotivated, but I didn’t miss my repayment dates. I increased my antidepressant dosage. I started sleeping more. We talked to each other less, allowed routine to pulverize our interactions into a dull loop. And then Noah auditioned for the musical, and we were able to slip outside ourselves, if only briefly. I never told them how much of a relief this was, to act toward otherness, and how much I dreaded the end of the show’s run. We would have to return to our apartment. Our uninterrupted lives.

The primary cast members of 25th Annual are immediately distinguishable as caricatures of middle-school oddballs. William Barfée is a stereotypical nerd—overachieving, chubby, inelegantly clothed, allergy-afflicted—who battles a pervasive loneliness and belittlement with condescension and arrogance. Leaf Coneybear is the affable and joyful second-alternate who makes his own clothing and is constantly belittled by his family for appearing dumb when he simply marches to the beat of his own drum. These children are loud and bold and assertive of their individuality—except for Olive Ostrovsky. Olive stands out because she is none of these things. Olive’s defining trait is that she is alone—she says her father is on his way and her mother is at an ashram in India. She is also quiet and bookish and a fan of puns, but mostly she is alone. The actress who played her in the Broadway Haven Players’ production felt a half-step more attuned to loss than her competitors, but I didn’t think about this during rehearsal. I was immersed in the nameless throng of misfits and weirdos to which Noah and I had been drafted.

In between my own words and sitting next to Noah-as-Qonyr on the stage during the first act run-through, I was introduced to one woman’s defaced American Girl doll and another’s yo-yo collection. I was thrown in and out of choreography I didn’t know and whispered with the other ensemble members during transitional moments in the music. I felt a thrill when Noah collapsed their posture, eyes rolled halfway in a perpetual look of disgust while they buried their hands into an oversized hoodie’s pouch or cradled a 3DS. They had fully slipped out of their identity as Noah, as my partner, and into this stranger. I loved watching Noah perform almost as much as I loved when they bounced ideas off me. I felt close to them when we talked about what clothing Qonyr would wear, or what an ambiguous line in a song meant. Through these alien intermediaries I felt at ease with our relationship for the first time in months. There was no idle time to scroll through Reddit or Twitter alone. No latitude to drift on different planes of conversation or withhold and doubt emotions. Discussing these characters meant that we could not float into different rooms or have half-hearted conversations about work—it demanded an active involvement, an intentional recognition of the other.

“Didn’t you ever see yourself in these characters growing up?” Noah once asked me. I didn’t have an answer for them. I don’t have many memories of my childhood, or I have memories, but they are memories of those memories, or I do have memories but I don’t trust that they haven’t been processed through layers of anxiety. In reading the script again with Noah’s question on my mind, though, I saw myself in Olive. Olive, who calls the letters in the dictionary her friends. Olive, who understands that language, when recited and replayed, can be a home. 

I love you

I love you

I love you

I love you. 

I had never stopped telling Noah that I loved them. But the purpose, at some point, began to shift. It became less a promise than a ritual, an attempt to soothe the worry that I would come home one day and find myself alone. I didn’t tell them this, though. I didn’t know what had catalyzed this dread—if asked, there was no singular moment I could point to, only the feeling that the days we felt in sync seemed rarer or that we were living separate lives in the same apartment. Even on our best days, when we would joke back and forth for hours or dance to Carly Rae Jepsen or watch a terrible movie curled against each other on the couch, I couldn’t shake the fear of them leaving me. I felt like I was lying to them by saying nothing, but I knew that the longer I kept it hidden, the longer I could put off possibly having that fear realized, perhaps evade it entirely. I wanted, more than anything, for them to tell me that I was overthinking things, but I wasn’t sure they would. My unspoken frustrations about furniture or chores or the warmth of our lightbulbs accrued in the corners of our conversations. I didn’t feel like I deserved to need things, so I said nothing. I said nothing when we stopped kissing, when I began tracking the days, weeks, since they had last held me close to their body. Or when I could no longer remember the last time I believed them when they said “I love you.” I hoped that I could keep our home alive with silence, what I saw as the duty of love.

In “The I Love You Song,” Olive, after being prompted to spell the word “chimerical,” manifests the version of her family that she knows should exist. Instead of a father who may or may not have planned on coming to the bee and a mother who may or may not be at an ashram in India, Olive sings with her dream parents: two loving adults who provide her with the validation and support she yearns for. Even the recognition that she deserves stability is presented as wildly fanciful, highly unrealistic. This is the only time we see her parents on stage. Olive’s father never arrives; her mother never writes from wherever she has gone. So Olive, as she has done her whole life, finds a way forward through language and the promise of a feeling that may never actually arrive. The song ends with Olive spelling “chimerical” correctly; of course she knows this word. 

I, on the other hand, was eliminated on my second word—“Xerophthalmiology.” As every ejected contestant did, I was handed a prop juice box and exited stage left. I found a seat in the fourth row on the aisle and watched Noah’s journey as Qonyr end with the first act. 

I watched their body move through the final moments of this imagined life with the ease that comes from transforming your body through someone else’s choreography again and again, their uplifted face and arms engrossed in the rapture of the act 1 closing number. I felt so much love for them. And I knew, just as I had for all of Noah’s other musicals, I would cry the first night I saw them on stage, and maybe the second, too. I would cry because Noah would fully sell their role, because I had heard them sing night after night and hearing them sing on stage was like a natural completion, because after they came home from the final cast party there would be nothing keeping us from the slowly widening gap of our lives.

Our relationship was ending and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I knew this, but I couldn’t admit it until after we broke. I couldn’t imagine a future where we were not together, and I was afraid that if I spoke that possibility, it would come true. We were not happy. Our time together was becoming more obligation than privilege; each activity felt like a new scene to act in. I didn’t love or feel loved in the way I wanted to, but I was not prepared to lose what felt like the most important relationship of my life. I said nothing until we began couples therapy. Two months later, we would end our relationship. The only difference my silence had made was time.

Olive doesn’t win the spelling bee. She comes in second, after battling through successive rounds of words with the last remaining competitor, the aloof nerd. They both see winning as their only navigable future. Their goals are incompatible; they both know this. In the final moments of the bee, Olive’s language finally fails her. She misspells “elanguescence,” giving her competitor the opportunity to win. However, he doesn’t immediately take it. He balks, wonders whether he has the power to end his newfound friend’s dream of winning, and it is only at Olive’s insistence that he does so. 

And what then, after she returns home? We are given two possibilities, the uplifting version used for the Broadway production and the version written by librettist Rachel Sheinkin and rejected by composer William Finn for being too depressing. This rejected future is the one that most compels me: “Olive Ostrovsky went home to an empty house, an uncertain future, and a well-worn dictionary—but a strange new conviction that she would be able to face all three.” I want Olive to be picked up by her father, to experience the support she never felt in the show, to watch her father trace the bonded fibers of her second-place ribbon between his fingers as she reenacted every beat of the bee, but I know this is just desire. More than that, I need to believe in her resilience. I need to know that even after she surrenders the one future she felt was acceptable, even after she found herself once again alone, she survives.

Published May 30th, 2021