The End Has Come

Last Sunday in Washington Square Park, Circus Amok ended its 2006 season with two amazing shows. We had to stop the first one in the middle for the rain, but we waited 10 minutes and after it passed, we continued. The four o'clock show went beautifully. Olympia Dukakis and her husband, Louis Zorich, were in the audience, looking surprised and delighted and she looked totally Oscar-winning. Also there were Cynthia Nixon and her partner, Christine Marinoni, along with their children. Several weeks ago, at Union Square, Debra Messing was in the audience. How exciting.

I thought the shows this year were extremely sucessful. At the St. Mary's Park show we were introduced to Louis, a 16 year-old local kid who explained that he'd been coming to see Circus Amok in that very park for the last ten years. After the show, after Cindy does her juggling act bit about the LGBT-Q-456-N-R Fund for Justice, Louis asked Michelle if that was, um, how everyone, uh, identified. "I'm gay too," he said, "but my mother doesn't accept me." He thanked us for coming. It was all bigger than the words.

Someone asked me once "But how do you know if you're changing people's minds?" and I told them that I didn't really care about that, because it had changed me. It is easy to forget when you're a part of it, that Amok is really an extremely subversive, renegade, and although sometimes we feel like we have to move the damn crash pad one more time, we're actually--ACTUALLY--bringing theater to neighborhoods which otherwise might not see something like that. It's a beautiful kind of activism.

It's sad when it ends, and yet you're left with all this accomplishment. (And banged up toes and knees and scratched elbows, but that's another story. Don't even mention the lower back stuff.) Plus we tend to see each other throughout the year in other contexts. But it's not the same concentration, which is what people will miss. It's what I miss.