A coffee mug with my name on it.  M. CARLSON.  Black letters on white tape, affixed by the stage manager (or more likely, the assistant stage manager).  The process is not very complicated, probably involving thirty seconds with a label maker.  But the first time, that very first time, it definitely made an impact.

(The coffee cup provided for me at PlayMakers Rep, as well as the text by Kushner)

I arrived at rehearsal to find a coffee mug with my name on it in late December of 2004, at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, CT.  Might seem like a small, even unimportant detail now, but at the time it was for me a very tangible acknowledgement of status, even success; somewhat like having your name on a director’s chair while on a film set, though to a lesser degree I suppose.  I had moved to New York immediately after graduating from Northwestern in 2003, which was not the easiest transition.  I slowly began to find my way in a city and a profession that both loomed large to someone on the outside looking in.  At long last, a small break for me came when I got the offer to do this play at the Long Wharf.  Now it was not exactly a glamorous job.  I didn’t have any lines, and I spent most of the play in a Nazi uniform moving furniture around the set during transitions.  But it was the Long Wharf, and it led to grad school and everything that followed.  Not to mention, I got a coffee mug with my name on it.

(The table where we’ve been working in rehearsal for Angels in America)

The New Year finds me in rehearsals for Angels in America at PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, NC.  We’re still at the table: slowly sifting through the plays, parsing through its dense and beautiful language, looking at research images and texts.  Near the end of Millennium Approaches, the first of the two plays that make up Angels in America, one of the characters says, “The twentieth century.  Oh dear, the world has gotten so terribly, terribly old.”  As we start another year of the twenty-first century (and as I find myself ever closer to 30), I’ve been thinking again about where I am and where I’ve been.  I filled my coffee cup at rehearsal the other day and realized how much I now take it for granted that someone puts my name on a mug before I arrive at the theater.  But it’s important to put your name to what is yours.  And it’s important to remember what you have.

(New Year’s Eve in Chapel Hill, NC with my girlfriend Lesley Shires)

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