About This Project

Sometimes a show becomes your whole life.

My Whole Life Was In That Show began with a story Jerry Stiller told on Theater Talk.

He was talking about his experience doing Hurlyburly , how the show and the people in it spilled far beyond the hours spent onstage. The cast would go out together afterward, stay out late into the night, and eventually the play was no longer simply something he was performing in.

It had become his life.

That idea stayed with me because anyone who has spent enough time in theater understands exactly what he meant.

A production can take over your schedule, your friendships, your relationships, your thoughts, your emotional life and, for a while, your entire sense of who you are.

Sometimes it is the whole run.

Sometimes it is one rehearsal.

One performance.

One disaster.

One person.

One moment that somehow gets permanently lodged in your memory.

That was the beginning of My Whole Life Was In That Show.

Why “show”?

The inspiration came from a play, but I never wanted this project to be limited to plays.

It might be a musical, a play, a concert, a performance piece, a community-theater production, a school show, an experimental work, a major professional production, or something almost nobody else ever saw.

What matters isn’t what kind of production it was.

What matters is what it did to you.

That is why it became My Whole Life Was In That Show.

From stories to theater

I first started this project in 2019 with the goal of collecting these experiences and eventually turning them into a theatrical performance built from the voices of the people who contributed them.

One of the models that helped shape my thinking was Ken Davenport’s My First Time.

That project grew from an online collection of anonymous, real-life stories about people’s first sexual experiences. Tens of thousands of stories were contributed, and material from that collection was ultimately shaped into an Off-Broadway play performed by four actors.

What inspired me was the structure of the idea: invite a community to tell its own stories, then find the theater inside those stories.

There is no formal connection between My First Time and My Whole Life Was In That Show. It is simply an example of something I find enormously compelling: real people contributing real experiences that collectively become a piece of theater.

You can learn more about Ken Davenport’s play here:

My First Time, Ken Davenport
https://kendavenport.com/projects/my-first-time/

The original story-collection website also still exists:

MyFirstTime.com
https://www.myfirsttime.com/

Whose stories belong here?

Everyone’s.

This is a theater-specific project, but it is not a Broadway project or a professional-theater project.

It belongs to actors, directors, writers, producers, stage managers, designers, technicians, crew members, musicians, students, community-theater people, professional-theater people, and audience members.

If participating in, or experiencing, a piece of theater became important enough that you still carry some part of it with you, your story belongs here.

What kind of story are we looking for?

There isn’t one kind.

I am not looking specifically for funny stories, sad stories, backstage disasters, or great artistic revelations.

I am looking for the moments that mattered.

Maybe it was the show that consumed your life for three months.

Maybe it was the production where you met someone who changed everything.

Maybe it was the night everything went wrong.

Or the night everything inexplicably went right.

Maybe it was a rehearsal you still think about twenty years later.

Maybe it was a moment onstage when something about yourself suddenly made sense.

Maybe you were sitting in the audience and saw something that permanently changed the way you looked at the world.

Or maybe it is just one completely ridiculous story that gets told every time theater people gather at the bar.

If it has stayed with you, I want to hear it.

Why collect these stories?

People who live in and around theater understand how intense this world can be.

For a while, you become a family.

You spend absurd numbers of hours together.

You create something from nothing.

You fight.

You fail.

You fall in love.

You panic.

You laugh until you cannot breathe.

Then the show closes.

The set disappears. Everyone moves on. And this enormous thing that temporarily consumed your life suddenly exists mostly in the memories of the people who were there.

To someone outside the theater, it can be difficult to understand why anyone would care this much about something so temporary.

These stories can help explain it.

They can preserve experiences that might otherwise disappear. They can celebrate the people who make theater. And perhaps, taken together, they can give people outside this community a glimpse into why this strange, ephemeral art form can matter so profoundly to those of us who participate in it.

Where this is going

The goal is eventually to build these stories into an evening of monologues.

Some may be funny.

Some may hurt.

Some may be surprising.

Some may make absolutely no sense to anyone who has never spent six weeks in a rehearsal room.

But together, I hope they become a portrait of what it feels like when theater stops being something you are merely doing or watching and becomes, for some period of time, part of your life.

The finished piece should not be my story.

It should be our stories.

Different generations.

Different kinds of theater.

Different jobs.

Different places.

Different experiences.

The common thread is simply this:

At some point, something about a show became bigger than just a show.

Maybe for one night.

Maybe for years.

Maybe forever.

Add your story

If there is a show, production, rehearsal, performance, person, or moment that has never really left you, I hope you’ll add it to the project.

You don’t have to be famous.

The production doesn’t have to have been important to anyone else.

And the story doesn’t have to be polished.

It just has to matter to you.

Because while your whole life might have been in that show, my whole life is currently in this one.

Thanks, Jeff

Every show has a story. What’s yours?