I was asked to deliver the Keynote Address for BroadwayCon, a three day expo for fans of Broadway theater.  The theme of the Opening Ceremony was “Home,” and included performances by Susan Egan singing “Home” from Beauty and the Beast, Hailey Kilgore with “Home” from The Wiz, as well as Ethan Slater, Ben Cameron, and Anthony Rapp contributing other songs and an opening group performance of “BroadwayCon Today,” set to the tune of “Bikini Bottom Day” from SpongeBob SquarePants – The Musical.This is what I shared with the audience at the Opening of BroadwayCon on Friday, January 11

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Okay, I want you to take a moment to yourself to finish this sentence: Home is…. Blank.

If you even could fill in that blank and we all said our answers aloud there’d probably be as many different answers as there are people in this room.  In fact, there’s probably no other word that conjures so many meanings except for Love.

I’m obsessed with the word Home and have been since the years of moving from New York to California in high school where we kept switching homes to my various college dorm rooms then back to New York before two years at ART (the American Repertory Theater)  followed by a stint at Trinity Rep before moving back to New York where I blazed through several too expensive or rat-infested apartments which resulted in a period of 17 years in which I moved 19 times. I’m also one of the people who’ve made The Wizard of Oz the most watched movie of all time, and if you look at my bookshelves you’ll find one entirely devoted to titles like The Meaning of Home, Home: A Short History, Place and Identity: The Performance of Home, The Poetics of Space, The Zen of Oz – and my favorite poem is T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in which he says “Home is where one starts from,” and sometimes at night to help me fall asleep I watch the show House Hunters which is about people searching for homes – and in high school I wrote a song called “Take Me Back Home” and in my musical Dream True, I wrote lyrics for a song called Finding Home – and last season with SpongeBob SquarePants I made a show that was ALL about home: SpongeBob trying to save his home, Pearl wanting to run away from home, Sandy missing her home but coming to find a new one in the community of Bikini Bottom, and Squidward who only truly feels at home with his name in lights on the Great White Way.

Danny Skinner, Lilli Cooper and Ethan Slater in “SpongeBob SquarePants – The Musical”

But what interests me most these days is not feeling or being at home, as much as missing home and the search that results from it, which I believe is the catalyst for great human activity and achievement across centuries and cultures. Home is both “our place of origin and our ultimate destination,” so its identity is two-fold:  the home we remember – which causes the missing – and the home we dream – which causes the searching. And the search is what brings us poetry and relationships and men on the moon – and Broadway shows.

When I was in my twenties, I was sick in bed one day and started watching the ten-hour marathon of a show called The Family, hosted by the self-help guru John Bradshaw, in which he led viewers through an extended series of exercises.  I was asked to close my eyes and recall one moment from when I was a toddler, age 3 or 4 – and I remembered for the first time being outside in the playground at our house, sitting on one of those toy horses with springs that rock back and forth. I remembered the sunlight, the exact angle of its rays as it warmed me – but most vividly I remembered the feeling: free, safe, at home. Then Bradshaw asked me to recall an image from ages 6 to 9. What came was a memory of standing outside the kitchen door to my house, and trying to get in as I always did, but finding the door locked. And again, I remembered above all the feeling: alone, confused, rejected. There were only several years between those two moments but somehow in that time my experience had shifted from feeling at home in the world to feeling displaced in it.

Now I, like most in this room, am beyond blessed to have had that feeling arise from a locked door, as opposed to the millions on our planet who experience it due to  eviction, deportation, exile, imprisonment, or destruction of physical homes due to natural disaster, war, or poverty.  But I do believe that, though our physical realities may vastly differ, whether we’re born into privilege or poverty, whether our childhood was happy or brutal, we all share at our core a kind of spiritual or emotional homesickness – a longing for Home.

What is this thing, Home?  Home is… Blank.  What?

Last night when I asked my girlfriend what home meant to her and if she’s experienced the theater as a home, she answered Yes, she felt that way in high school when she joined the drama club and, to quote her, “suddenly felt I had a place.”  She went on to say that, as an actor, she felt at home on stage because she could express parts of her self that she couldn’t express in her physical home – she could be angry or mean or jealous on stage, but not with her parents at home.

Is Home the space to which you can bring all the parts of yourself and not just the pretty ones? Is Home the space – physical or emotional or spiritual – in which you’re most dimensional and least defined by others? Is Home a feeling of safety – knowing you will be cared for and protected there? Is Home the experience of being seen and known and, above all, accepted – not only by others perhaps but also by your self?

Yes And. At least for me. The word I keep circling back to is Belonging. Home as the experience of belonging.  Belonging in a family or relationship or cast or, in the rare moments you’re truly at home in your own skin and the stars align, the experience of belonging in the universe itself.

But when do we ever feel this?  Maybe never or occasionally. But we all want to feel this right? Because on some cellular level we carry a memory of it within us already – the feeling of belonging and being protected in our first home – yes, I’m talking about being in the womb – the enclosed, dark, safe space from which we emerge… Sounds a bit like a theater, huh? Just saying.

So we go through our lives longing to return to or find for the first time this space, this feeling. And the desire for the feeling becomes the motive of our actions. We walk on roads and go on journeys and make art and make musicals and go to the theater and listen to cast albums as we search for Home.  We travel, we read, we find lovers, make families, build structures, create communities, tell stories as we search for Home.

Which brings me to the theater – the place we tell stories. Most often, stories of the search.

According to Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, there’s only one story – it’s called the Monomyth – and it’s told over and over in all cultures, in all times, but through varying specifics.  It’s the story we need to tell because it’s the story of our search for meaning, for wholeness, for Home. And the need for this story is what defines us as humans. It’s the story of Seasons, from death to rebirth, and the story of Night turning to Day, from dark to light – it’s the Hero’s Journey and it’s a story about going away from and returning back to Home. (Also, keep in mind, the “hero” may be a man or a woman, a child, a creature, a community…)

Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz”

It’s here we find Odysseus and Aeneas, Dorothy and Luke Skywalker, Ishmael searching for Moby Dick and Alice going into Wonderland.  It’s here we find most any show playing on Broadway right now, all versions of the Monomyth and Hero’s Journey: Harry Potter, Wicked, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lion King, Hamilton, Book of Mormon, Kinky Boots, the list goes on. And here too we find in Broadway’s history versions of the Monomyth in The Sound of Music, Death of a Salesman, Cabaret, Man of La Mancha, The Miracle Worker, Oliver, How to Succeed, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Hairspray, Billy Elliot – I better stop.  (Of course the danger in our use of the Hero’s Journey template to write a show is that we end up with shows that are more formula than fresh… but that’s for another day.)

As audiences for these shows, we connect to something mythic and subliminal – the Monomyth provides the familiarity of a home terrain.  And when we connect with the specifics of story or character and are able to identify our self in the drama – when we see representation that includes who we are – when we see lost or hidden parts of ourselves brought into light with compassion or love… Then too we find Home.

As people making these shows, we hope for connection as well – to reach across the footlights and feel something back. And in the meantime, we put ourselves in rooms with collaborators we quickly call Family, we establish familiar routines (how we sign in, warm up, set up our dressing rooms), we operate in a space where everyone’s contribution matters, from the director to the props master to the second electrician,  and when we go into a theater, most anywhere in the world, we recognize its signifiers as our own: the stage, the house, its architecture, its shadows, its aisles and fly rails, its ghostlight…. These we know intimately though we may be in a foreign city.

So we make theater and we see theater as a search for Home, and often it becomes one.  The theater is home when it offers us familiarity and intimacy – when it offers us safety as we attempt the impossible and splay open our souls and expose our vulnerabilities and fall on our faces only to discover it’s all okay – It’s okay to do that here. The theater is home when it’s a space where ALL, including the me riddled with shame or doubt or self-loathing, yes ALL, including neurotic me and lonely me and bullied me and isolated me, are welcome. When ALL are welcome.

Today I ask that we continue to share and expand this home of the theater – that we offer to others, not in this room, the refuge and comfort that we’ve all surely found here at times.

May Broadway be a home for an ever-larger family of theater-makers of every race, class, religion, country of origin, immigration status, (dis)ability,  age, gender identity, and sexual orientation who are making stories about and for audiences and fans of every race, class, religion, country of origin, immigration status, (dis)ability, age, gender identity, and sexual orientation. May our home be open, and grow ever larger in size and love.

May you search for and find a home in the theater.

May you find a home, here, today, at this conference –

And know that when we say “Welcome to BroadwayCon,” we are really saying, “Welcome Home.”

© Tina Landau, 2019, used by permission

Attendees at BroadwayCon (Photo by Howard Sherman)

If the sight of perhaps 750 theatre fans spontaneously breaking into a song from their favourite musical warms your heart, then the conference rooms of the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue were the place to be on January 22. If the cast of that same musical, having heard about the impromptu singalong, asking some 3,000 theatre fans to sing to them is similarly inspiring, well you should have been in the Hilton ballroom that same afternoon.

From January 22 to 24, the Hilton was home to the first BroadwayCon, a fan convention for theatre buffs. Filled with events, performances and panels not just about Broadway, but about the theatre overall – though admittedly with a tilt towards musicals – BroadwayCon reportedly sold some 6,000 tickets, which had gone on sale 10 months earlier and cost $125 per day or $250 for the weekend.

I went to BroadwayCon with a mixed agenda: first, sheer curiosity, second, the intention to document it for this column, and third, because I had been invited to moderate a panel about production assistants who subsequently ‘made it big’ in the theatre business. I didn’t know quite what to expect, and one press representative I saw at the event confessed that when it was first announced, there was a feeling of uncertainty in their office.

On the eve of the event, The New York Times cited the demographics of the attendees, provided by the organisers: “Nearly 80% of the registrants are female; 75% are from outside the state of New York; and 50% are 30 or younger.” That’s a far cry from the general assumptions about theatre appealing to an increasingly older crowd, and while 6,000 fans certainly can’t sustain the field alone, the sight of multiple Elphabas, Phantoms, and Tracy Turnblads was evidence that theatre still holds a very strong appeal.

What was on offer? Among many options, there were cast conversations with leads from Fun Home, Spring Awakening, Hamilton and Fiddler on the Roof, and a reunion of cast members of Rent (just days before the 20th anniversary of Jonathan Larson’s passing and the show’s first Off-Broadway preview). There were fan meet-ups organised by affinity (a room that was packed by Sondheim fans at 10am was rather sparse by 11am, when the call was for Lloyd Webber buffs), conversations about diversity, design and marketing, as well as audience participation games and variety shows. Both singalongs I mentioned earlier were from Hamilton events.

I experienced a mild sense of deja vu throughout the weekend (I spent time at BroadwayCon on each of its three days) because it was 40 years ago, to the precise weekend, that I had attended my very first fan convention of any kind, the 1976 International Star Trek Convention, at the very same hotel. It is frankly remarkable that with the flourishing of fan conventions since that time, it was only this year that anyone managed to capitalise on the convention model for theatre and Broadway.

While there were occasional snafus with wrangling crowds into the largest and most popular events on Friday, a gigantic blizzard unfortunately prevented many fans – as well as guest speakers and performers – from reaching the hotel on Saturday, and even Sunday. But the organisers scrambled valiantly and effectively to insure a good experience for those who made it. So while the attendance never seemed as high as on that first day, and while the largest rooms may not have always been as filled, I sensed no lessening of enthusiasm among the die-hards who had either stayed over at the hotel or braved the elements to be there.

Like Broadway itself, access to BroadwayCon wasn’t cheap, and presumably there were countless fans who couldn’t attend because of the added expense of a flight and hotel tickets. But this first year should prove that there’s an enormous appetite among theatre fans to gather both with those they admire, and others who share their passions, getting out of social media and chat rooms and into real life interactions. As someone who began the weekend by adopting a slight distance and harbouring even a bit of cynicism, I was drawn back through heavy snow and puddles of icy slush because BroadwayCon successfully tapped into my inner fanboy, and because I was having a good time watching others have a good time. It gave them access to the world I’ve long been in. The theatre must do more of that.

WestEndCon, anyone?

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.