There’s something nobody tells you about being a kid at rehearsal. How the adults stop being adults for a minute. How they shed all that bullshit, the mortgage anxiety, the careful professional face, the parental authority, and become something else entirely. Something rawer. Something that plays.
I grew up in rehearsal spaces. Theaters that smelled like dust and old wood and somebody’s forgotten coffee. My father’s rehearsals. And what I learned, what got hardwired into my neural pathways before I could even articulate it, was this: this is where the real shit happens. Not in the performance. Not when everyone’s watching. But here. In the mess. In the trying.
Elena’s working magic in these pictures, but she doesn’t know it yet. She’s just being a kid at rehearsal. Maybe she’s bored. Maybe she’s transfixed. Maybe she’s building entire universes out of whatever detritus is lying around the Wave Organ while the grown-ups do their thing.
But she’s absorbing something else too. She’s learning that adults, these supposedly finished, decided people, are actually just making it all up as they go. That they fuck up. That they laugh at themselves. That they chase something they can’t quite name, over and over, until they nail it or time runs out.
That’s the power of it. Watching adults play. Really play. Not the sanitized, performative version they do for kids. But the desperate, hungry, hilarious, occasionally pathetic version they do for themselves. The version where they fall on their faces and get back up and try the same goddamn line seventeen different ways because it matters.
You can’t teach that. You can only witness it.
And if you’re lucky enough to be a kid at rehearsal, to see your father or your mother or the adults in your orbit drop the mask and chase the thing they actually give a shit about, it rewires you. Forever. You learn that the interesting stuff happens in the attempting. That failure is just part of the process. That play isn’t something you outgrow; it’s something you fight to protect.
Elena’s just there. Just present. Just working her own quiet magic while the Wave Organ breathes and the Lauen and Derek chase their moment.