Risk Versus Reward

I also had time to devote to relationships. I met Teresa in the spring of my sophomore year at her audition for Penn State. Teresa was a year younger than me and had just finished a year at her local community college in Maryland. I knew she would come to Penn State, I knew she would get into the school, and I knew we were going to be close.

Terri and I started dating that fall. We had a similar taste for eclectic rock music. We shared a love of Radiohead, and she introduced me to Sunny Day Real Estate and the Eels. I introduced her to Jeff Buckley. She’d grown up in Boalsburg, it turned out. She went to elementary school with people I then graduated high school alongside. There was a kismet connection between us, and neither of us could fully explain it.

There was also a history there I couldn’t penetrate...

... In spite of dysfunction in our relationship, I could not help but fall in love with her deeply. She was lovely, sensitive, tender, kind, and in many ways wise beyond her years. She just happened to be closed off because of a difficult past. I’d seen my father’s personal triumphs over tragedy, and I felt strongly that she would sort this out. I kept at it.

We broke up 3 times over a two-year period... I was on edge, sleeping less than I should, trying desperately to maintain the focus that had gotten me where I wanted to be as a student of the impossible art of the theatre. I was not as patient with her as she needed me to be. We each broke up with the other, and we reconciled fairly soon after each time.

I was feeling torn in many directions. Terri pulled at me, so did my studies and all the shows that never stopped coming. I was not going to church much. It was as though the theatre began to take the place of faith in my life. Not sleeping enough added to that stew. I was still me – friendly, uplifting, dedicated – but internally I was angry, restless and confused. I was 21 years old but felt like I was gripped in the kind of crisis I’d missed out on at 16.

All of these factors came unexpectedly to a unique catharsis in a creative work I made for my honor’s thesis. I stayed for a fifth year to make the show, which my friends thought was a little (ok, a lot) crazy of me. The show I made, with the help of my film major friend Marty and his wife Kelly (good friends of Teresa’s and mine), was Asylum 11, a multimedia show where I played ten different characters across five television screens and acted live as well. The story of the show was a comic book premise – the audience was seeing the final issue of a comic book series unfold. The characters onscreen were all the major players in the Asylum comic series, a comic storyline that I made up just for the show. The live actor was the series’ creator, who’d been kidnapped by the characters in an effort to force him to finish the story.

The show was about identity as much as anything. Each character in Asylum 11 represented a piece of my own self that I felt was at war with the rest of me. The show allowed me to metaphorically resolve a mess of internal conflicts that college life had stirred up within me. And in a weird way, it worked. I came to grips with faith issues and embraced my spiritual sense of self and the Christian foundations of my spiritual life. I also forgave myself for not going to church as much and realized that my spiritual journey was headed in a broader direction. I realized that I valued my own health and sanity over any satisfactions the theatre could give me. I realized that I valued relationships and happiness more than theatre. I recognized some of the darker parts of my persona, and in personifying them in the show, I felt I was able to purge some of their mystery and have a bit of personal catharsis. My Asylum year was a definite moratorium experience, and afterward I honestly felt comfortable with who I was for the first time in five years. It wasn’t all the shows or the grades or all the accolades that did it. It was a carefully structured, intensely personal art therapy experience. The art I had studied, the art I had trained for, the art so wrapped up in presentation of self to others, had allowed me a better understanding of myself. That outward-focused art allowed me a moment of genuine personal intimacy and understanding. When I began the project, I'd dreamed of creating a unique work of theatre that might catch on and maybe even become popular. Ironically, what it became was a deeply personal piece, and its popularity -- the number of people who actually saw it -- was immaterial (though, for the record, not too many folks saw it... and that's okay).

Asylum was my last Outlaw gasp at Penn State, one last effort to pull off the truly impossible. We pulled it off. And, we didn’t. The final performance at Penn State (the last Outlaws show of the year) was incomplete, and so we made sure we called it a workshop performance. I was devastated and exhausted, but the audiences were encouraging.

Terri’d gone home to Maryland that year. She was running out of financial options for Penn State. She and her dad were mending fences and developing their relationship, but her dad also got laid off and had to take a job with significantly less pay. She was going to go home, work and save money for school. We broke up (mutual agreement this time) for the summer she left and we decided to focus on our friendship, but by the fall we were talking about a whole other level of commitment. The friendship focus worked, briefly, almost too well--we became closer than ever.

I was pushing envelopes with my theatre studies and somehow it felt ok to push the envelope on this relationship. I was incredibly (naively) optimistic – my parents had married young, and look how wonderful our home life had been! In spite of all my family’s obstacles, we’d persevered. I believed Terri could do it, too, and I thought once she was a part of my family she would learn how from seeing it firsthand. I think my enthusiasm convinced her, too. We got engaged in September of 2001, three weeks after the shock of 9/11.

We married on June 29, 2002. We wed in Eisenhower Chapel on the Penn State campus, the same place my parents had married some thirty years before.