ACT I: The Runthrough
“You’ll be assistant stage manager,” a friend of mine recently told me. He was producing a play and needed some help. I quickly learned this was code for “his bitch”: the assistant stage manager’s job is to run errands and do shit tasks nobody else wants to deal with.
The play, written and directed by Charlie Nevins, DC ’26, and produced by Jesse Nevins, DC ’28, follows a group of five Vassar post-grads. Charlotte, Liz, Theo, and Agnes move to Marseille, France, immediately following graduation with the hopes of becoming writers and artists. But Jack, an aspiring photographer, stays back in New York. The 24-hour period when Jack comes to stay with the group in France is compressed into 135 minutes onstage. The characters address their frustrations with life after college and the process of finding purpose—whatever that even means.
I arrived at my first rehearsal for Marseille, about a month out from the initial show. In fact, it was my first rehearsal, for anything, ever.
Linsly-Chittenden room 307 was buzzing—the same one I stumble into groggily for Spanish class each morning. It was costume try-on day. “Nanã” by Polo and Pan was playing on the speakers. The producer was trying to cultivate a “fashion-show” vibe. The actors laid out their costumes on the long, rectangular tables. The protagonist, Jack (played by Griffin Santopietro, BK ’28), was a post-grad photographer; his outfit was a crisp white tee paired with a blue linen shacket–essentially the same thing he wore to rehearsal. “I was thinking I would wear these pants,” he said as he patted the ones he was already wearing. “They’re my work pants. Like how a carpenter has his work pants, these are mine.” I looked at him. They’re fucking Buck Mason . . . good God. The little faux-couture situation wrapped up, and the director, wearing a shirt emblazoned with a Freud quote (naturally), called out: “Alright, everybody ready?” The cast promptly exited, so they could simulate their dramatic onstage entrance.
The actors burst back into the Linsly-Chittenden classroom. Suddenly, the quotidian door became a portal: charged energy spilled through the frame. It was electric.
ACT II: The Magic of Transformation
My laughter spun into awe as the rehearsal carried on. Friends and acquaintances (the actors) became strangers; the line between real and performed began to wane. The characters felt like they existed before and beyond the script, whole lives contained in gestures and silences.
Even when someone forgot a line, the illusion never cracked. “Line?” they’d holler, still in character. The stage manager would whisper the forgotten words, and they’d continue seamlessly. It was so professional, their ability to just carry on.
On stage, the tension between Jack and his ex, Charlotte (played by Sasha Fedderly, PC ’27), had been slowly building all evening, a fragile dance of nostalgia, jealousy, and unspoken regret.
Then came the panic attack scene, moments after Charlotte told Jack she wanted him to leave Marseille. Jack was a mixture of confused, heartbroken, and just pissed. His breathing shortened; his face flushed; his hands trembled. He exited stage left. As the scene yielded to intermission, he slipped back in through the rear door, still red in the face. “You alright?” someone asked. “Yeah, yeah I’m good. That was intense,” He chuckled, despite the slight fear in his eyes and crackling in the back of his throat. For a moment, it was hard to tell where the character ended and he began. Watching it all, I began to tear up. How did I not know this alchemy was happening in the mundane classrooms around me all along?
After the run, Charlie turned to me: “Emma, what’d you think!” Suddenly, everyone went quiet, eagerly awaiting my response–the first outsider’s opinion. Fuck. I searched for words to describe what I had just experienced. “Um, I don’t know,” I finally said. “I am moved as fuck right now.” Silence sliced the room, and then an eruption of cheers, hoots, hollers, and applause. “Clip that! Put it on the playbill!” someone yelled. “Emma Singer: ‘moved as fuck’”
And just like that, the moment dissolved. The director clapped: “Okay, everyone, notes.” The cast gathered in a small circle. They got out their little brown leatherbound journals in unison and began to scribble away.
Jesse left to go build the stage door. For them, this whole process was routine. For me, it was mindblowing.
ACT III: In the Making
A few weeks later, we began “tech week.” Look at me with my terminology.
People trickled into the space. There was the set designer who created the perfect living room: the colors all complementary, tones of warm orange and light wood, and these perfect paper light fixtures with incandescent bulbs. The rugs were tastefully chosen, one a wine red and the other a black and white chevron. There was a Le Labo candle on the living room table. I almost asked where they acquired it, but I stopped myself: they definitely just brought it from their own dorms.
There was the “food coordinator”—who we affectionately called “chickpea boy”—whose job was to find a way for the actors to chef up chickpea stew on stage. Additionally, he was tasked with creating non-alcoholic potions to look like Chablis, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Pastis, a licorice-y tasting French aperitif.
I was struck by how many hands it took to hold this whole thing up. Slowly, I became one of them.
ACT III: Rewritten
Something remarkable occurred on the second night of tech week. We had just finished our full run, and it was almost 10 pm. I was exhausted and ready to go home. But then, Charlie decided that the ending sequence of the play didn’t flow in the way he needed. So right there, he revised it. The ending scene between Agnes (played by Neve O’Brien, ES ’26) and Liz (played by Sage Bonta, SM ’28) had always been quiet. They were the last two characters standing. The scene existed in the afterglow of unraveled tension. But that night, as the director reworked the dialogue and the blocking on the spot, I watched the two actresses breathe new life into the production. I realized I wasn’t just watching a scene being fixed—I was watching an ending get reborn.
This is where I began to see the wonder of it all. I was watching people create worlds, tear them apart, and then rebuild and reimagine them.
ACT IV: Broken Legs
When I graduated high school, my dad gave me what I thought was some pretty great advice. He said, “Emma, up to this point, there was a track. On the first day of kindergarten, all the kids got on the starting line and started running as quickly as they could. You sprinted and sprinted until you crossed the finish line–getting into college or whatever. You knew exactly what was expected of you, and the structures that allowed you to excel were spelled out to you. Now there’s no track. You can run in any direction. It’s up to you what you do, what you value, and what you work towards.”
At the time, that advice was liberating. In practice, it felt a little like vertigo, maybe because I’m prone to motion sickness. I had always known what came next: assignments, deadlines, errands, obligations. Suddenly, there wasn’t a clear next thing.
So, maybe that’s why I said yes to Marseille in the first place. I wanted to stand close to something being made from nothing. When I arrived at Yale, I had to build my own house of flowers: one I filled with people, ideas, and virtues that felt like mine.
Watching the director rewrite that last scene between Charlotte and Liz—crossing out lines, respacing pauses, tweaking the ending—I realized that’s what I was doing too. I am still drafting and redrafting my own narrative, figuring out what belongs and what doesn’t. Charlie didn’t give me direction, but watching him offered something a bit more anchoring: the sense that my general life confusion wasn’t singular.
For a long time, I thought that volatility—my tendency to become wildly happy, then profoundly sad—made me fragile, but I actually think it is what makes me alive. Marseille didn’t solve the very real confusion of the whole “figuring out what we’re going to do with our lives” thing. But it gave those feelings a shape. It made them a bit approachable. In watching Charlotte trying to keep her cool as her ex-boyfriend crashed back into her life, Jack disguising his depression and loneliness by mocking the absurdity of his friends picking up and moving to Marseille, and Liz hiding her unease behind dry jokes and refills of red wine, I saw my own uncertainty refracted right back at me. My dad loves to say that if I just “beaver around enough” and “stay curious,” my life’s purpose will reveal itself. For a long time I thought this would happen passively–one day I’d stumble into some room or read some book and think: “yep, this is it.” But, I think it takes living through the sticky mess, not simply hoping for clarity to randomly arrive. Marseille taught me that purpose is not something you find, rather, something you build.
