Fifteen minutes into the first act, I reached across my friend’s lap and plucked the program off her legs. I thumbed through the waxy pages, idly scanning the cast list and the song index. The artist’s note caught me, written by actor, producer, and choreographer Sadie Pohl, SY ’26: “I’d been itching to do the show for years, but I hadn’t figured out exactly where this was coming from. And then I met someone who I knew without a doubt, right away, would be important to me. And they were. And they are. And I climbed up and down the most extraordinary emotional peaks and ravines. And that’s when I started to get it.”
I, too, have met someone who is important to me, and like Sadie, I am not going to tell you who. I know exactly where they are in a room in relation to me even when I am looking in the other direction. They emit a frequency I am perpetually tuned to receive. I have tried, with some real conviction, to recalibrate. My compass is not cooperating. In a 1975 conversation with Maya Angelou, James Baldwin said, “If I love you and I duck it, I die.” I am starting to feel like if I duck this one, I might too.
Then Guy, played by John Colbert JE ’26, wandered onto stage and sings about being a Broken-Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy, and I placed the program back in my friend’s lap and let my eyes return to the stage.
Once, a musical adapted from a 2007 film, is formally strange, as it refuses to name its characters. They are Guy and Girl. Guy is Irish, a busker, still in love with his ex, who’s moved to New York. Girl is Czech, a pianist, married. They meet on a Dublin street. Guy and Girl write and record songs together. In the end, Guy leaves for New York to pursue music and Girl stays in Ireland. The work is brilliant because it asks the audience to complete the circuit. A circuit with a gap in it is just wire. Once needed you need to bring your person, your unfinished thing, your murky water, otherwise the lights don’t come on. The playwright intended us to insert ourselves, and maybe Sadie was endorsing that. She admits she had not been able to crack the show until she had her person. I started to get it when I put my person in my head. The show was working exactly as designed.
There is a moment in the second act where Guy and Girl are sitting on a hillside, staring down at Dublin. Girl turns to Guy and says something in Czech, Miluji těbe. Guy does not understand. But, behind the actors, projected on the wall, a translation appears: I love you. When Guy asks what Girl she had just said, Girl replies, “It looks like rain.”
I love the way we say enormous things. Enormous things in an incommunicable language that looks like confession. It is not confession. Girl is saying, “I love you.” Guy is spared the knowledge of understanding, and, therefore, spared the obligation to respond. He does not have to accept, consider, or reject Girl’s love. He never heard her words. But they still linger in the air.
Her message remains where she placed it: intact and untouched by whatever might have followed. Love without consequence. That’s an oxymoron.
Next to me, my two friends watched. I stared at them as they stared at the stage, supplanting their own peoples’ faces onto that of Guy: an armature. It was beautiful, all of us being pathetic together, all of us getting tuned to our own different frequencies by the same transmission.
I’ve got enormous feelings about my someone; I am completely intoxicated by them. I’m infected by the disease, unwilling to get antibiotics. I’ve surrendered. Tom Robbins, in Still Life of a Woodpecker, wrote, “Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words make and stay become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.”
Here is what I know about myself: I am incapable of doing any of this cleanly. I find the ball of string, pick it up, spend considerable time and energy tangling it further, and then I sit with the wreckage of my own making and feel aggrieved about it. I have tried, with some regularity and zero success, to simply stop. To clean out the coffee cup the way you run the water long enough that it goes from dark-reddish brown to transparent. My water is unchangingly murky. I am actively preventing it from running clear, though I rarely admit this.
I think in some ways, that Friday night in the Saybrook theater, Once exposed me to myself. Guy leaves at the end. He goes to New York, to the woman he loved before, and Girl is left in Dublin. I sat there, during the finale, as Guy and Girl harmonized on “Falling Slowly (Reprise)” from across the world. They sang, , “Falling slowly, sing your melody / I’ll sing it loud / Take it all / I played the cards too late / Now you’re gone.” Maybe there’s consolation in that they leave each other. But as they sang I was gutted.
Underneath this grief I felt something sharper: Guy chose wrong. He should’ve stayed in Dublin with Girl. He loved her. He looked in her eyes and sang, “Falling slowly, eyes that know me / And I can’t go back.” I can’t imagine singing those words to someone I wasn’t going to stay with. Girl pushed him to leave, and he didn’t push back hard enough. The choice was right in front of him and he turned away.
I sat stewing in this alone for about thirty seconds, until the applause faded. Then, I heard a woman’s voice from in front of me, the mother of one of the actors. She announced, with gumption and a bit of sass, to nobody in particular, “That bitch in New York was going to cheat on him.”
I got home and opened my journal to make some thought soup. I shuffled my Spotify, which landed with malicious precision on Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” Nice of you to join me, Joni, and thank you for piping in: “I looked at love from both sides now / From give and take still somehow / It’s love’s illusions that I recall / I really don’t know really / I really don’t know love at all.” I have always heard this song as full of defeat and surrender. But sitting there after Once, I wondered if it was something else. Maybe not-knowing was actually the condition of the obsession itself, if love is specifically and permanently the experience of being unable to get clarity.
Which is to say: maybe it is Schrödinger’s love. It is everything we want it to be, and it is dead, and it never existed at all, and all three of these are simultaneously true until you open the box. And most of us, I think, choose not to open the box. We prefer the superposition. We prefer to live in the past and the present rather than the settled verdict of one tense or the other. This is not stupidity. It might actually be the most sophisticated position available to us: to hold the uncertainty, to refuse the closure, to keep the question open because the question is the only place where the thing is still alive.
I am not going to open the box. And it looks like it’s about to rain.
