Rebecca gets it. She understands that friendship is the most important thing there is because it requires you to show up without armor, without an agenda, without any guarantee that the other person won’t just look at you like you’re speaking Martian. It’s vulnerable and stupid and necessary, and most of us are too chickenshit to actually do it right. We perform friendship. We curate it. We post it. But we don’t live it.
The thing about theatre in a space like the Nitery is that it forces intimacy. You can’t hide behind production values or fourth walls. You’re there, in the same air, breathing the same exhaustion and possibility. And when the subject is friendship, real friendship, not like you and me or the Facebook kind, you’re basically asking people to confront every connection they’ve fumbled, every person they meant to call back, every moment they chose safety over risk.
“All this time we could’ve been friends”, fuck me if that’s the most devastating sentence in the English language. It’s regret and possibility colliding at highway speed. It’s the recognition that we walk past our people every goddamn day because we’re too scared or too busy or too convinced we already know the ending to the story.
The Nitery becomes a cathedral for this particular brand of loss and longing. Not religious, but sacred nonetheless.