A One Act/A Prize

bravery out loud

When I was a Freshman in high school, newly relocated to Atlanta from St. Louis, I found enough bravery to audition for the drama club’s fall one-act play. Schools from around the city would participate in the annual One-Act Play Festival which was really just a thinly-veiled competition for the rich private schools to show off how much money they have. That year my scrappy little public school was doing a piece called Stories I Ain’t Told Nobody Yet.

The show was by a local playwright who collected real stories from Appalachian folks. It was monologue-heavy with short scenes that provided some narrative connective tissue. A large portion of the script was taken verbatim from the Appalachian interviewees. The subject matter was weighty with moments of levity sprinkled in.

Somehow at 14, having grown up around a very specific Midwestern ping (don’t ask me to say bagel or crayon), I knew how to do a Southern accent. Or a least a passable-enough Southern accent for a high school one act play. I can guarantee it lacked nuance, accuracy, or regional specificity. But again: high school. When the cast list was posted I was shocked to find my name.

I think back so fondly on those rehearsals. Sitting on stage after school in an empty theater with the florescent work lights humming overhead. We teenagers, aged 14 to 17 with one guy turning 18 during our run, dove into the lives of these mountain people. Over the course of that 45-minute piece we experienced cancer, divorce, layoffs, pawning one’s last possession, and the meaning of a potato salad recipe. My monologue lamented over Walmart’s decimation of a more human-centered life. And something about toilet seat covers.

On one hand, watching teenagers put on thick stage makeup to grieve over getting older and drowning in bills with fake accents is a little cringey. It was also beautiful. Over the course of those monologues, which seasoned actors could have made a meal of, we learned things about being human. We learned about loneliness and shame, inequality and justice, loss and joy. With our short stack of life experience, we gathered more bits of intel to fold into ourselves. While we might not have been able to articulate it, we learned about us. Well worth the price of a little cringe.

That’s the thing about Stories I Ain’t Told Nobody Yet and the stories you haven’t told anyone yet, they’re begging to be spoken. That’s how we begin to weave meaning around the things that happen to us. Our pain, heartbreaks, joy, and triumphs. That’s how things can “make sense.” In that is deep catharsis. It’s healing magic. As Maya Angelou says, “there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Speak that story out loud or on paper or on a canvas to ease the agony.

I don’t have many fears but this is one of them - to die bearing untold stories. Perhaps that’s my neurotic writer side. I have stories, fiction and non-fiction, memoirs and scripts, floating in my head all day long. In fact I’m rarely in the present moment because of them. And the painful truth is that I will never tell them all. Per the laws of time and space my stories will outlive my life’s ability to tell them. There are more of them than me. I think I grieve that. I know I do.

But perhaps, if I’m lucky and diligent enough, I’ll have the opportunity to tell the big ones. I may only get around to a fraction of what’s in my head but hopefully it will be the most important fraction. Hopefully the most ferocious and meaningful ones rise to my finger tips. I can’t think of a more devastating loss if they don’t.

So while we didn’t win that year’s One Act Play Competition, an honor I believe that went to Westminster who easily spent tens of thousands of dollars on producing the first act of The Importance of Being Earnest, we walked away with a prize of another kind. We, or at least I, learned the power of speaking one’s story. I learned that some things are universal if only we’re brave enough to say them out loud.