Coming Full Circle

I've discussed or referenced a certain play on multiple occasions on this blog, the play Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead by Bert V. Royal. The play is basically about the Peanuts comic strip characters grown up and in high school and dealing with a shitstorm of relatively intense adult themes and issues. You see Charlie Brown, Sally, Peppermint Patty, Marcie, Pigpen, Linus, Lucy, and Schroeder, but the playwright's given them different names (while still heavily alluding to their original ones) and different relationships. I was first exposed to this play my sophomore year as an undergrad when I was trying to look for a monologue to work on for my Acting I class, and I settled on a monologue spoken by Beethoven(Schroeder.) Of course I had to read the play, and since then, it has become one of my top five favorite plays of all time. I don't even know if I have three or four other plays that can make up the rest of the list, but if I did, Dog Sees God would hold its own place. 

This play strikes so many chords within me that I can't help but feel emotional when I read it. It covers a plethora of themes, notably: friendships, bullying, homosexuality, and suicide. I've come back to this play multiple times over the past two years or so, sometimes when I want to reuse the monologue for an audition, sometimes to reference a certain line that is particularly endearing to me because it deals with suicide. It's a truly mesmerizing play that I will always treasure. Oftentimes I have to stop and remember the play is a dark comedy, because it's so easy to get caught up in the characters' conflicts; I have to constantly remind myself to suspend my disbelief, heh. 

Anyways, one of the student organizations in the theatre department here at my school is putting on a production of Dog Sees God. Needless to say, I auditioned. 

AND I GOT CAST AS MOTHERFUCKIN' BEETHOVEN, BITCHES. 

I am SO excited. Words cannot even begin to describe how happy I am right now. Beethoven is easily my favorite character in the play (a fact that may or may not have to do with my doing his monologue and analyzing his character for class two years ago). But, he's Schroeder, and I've always had a kindred spirit with him. I think it has something to do with his being a piano geek, heh. 

But during my senior year in high school, the drama club did a production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, a musical based on the Peanuts characters (but in their respective, original ages, hah). In that show, I was cast as Schroeder, and it's since easily been my favorite memory of high school. 

And now, it just feels...right. Like deja vu, in a sense. I've come full circle; four years later after my part as Schroeder in my high school musical, in my senior year as an undergrad, I'm Schroeder/Beethoven once more. 

It's like fate, I tell ya. And I am so thrilled that this strange yet welcome series of events is happening to me right now. 

However, upon further examination I find there are other aspects of my undergrad senior year that aptly resemble/mirror my high school senior year. I have a semi-solid friend group, even if it's taken me nearly four years to branch out and find these people. This has to do with the fact that I feel I've broken through another layer of my shell and am growing more comfortable with who I am and how I interact with people. There's this play, and the role I've wanted and have been cast in. And finally a certain romantic interest. It's so eerie how it feels that I'm in this cycle, and I'm now just completing one turn of whatever this system is. 

It's a bit alarming in some aspects, but it doesn't worry me much. Some time ago I mentioned how I feel like college is supposed to be a time of molding; you'll feel yourself shift and morph and adjust your beliefs, your morals, and what you value in terms of friendships and relationships. Looking back now, as I'm slowly approaching the end of my time as an undergrad, I'll firmly say I've definitely gone through that reshaping process -- who knows, maybe I'm still going. 

But I am not one bit ashamed of how things are turning out and right now, I am pretty damn proud of myself.