Story Therapy: Tick, Tick…BOOM!
I started watching Tick, Tick…BOOM! on a complete whim one Saturday afternoon in February.
We have a pretty sweet setup in our living room, thanks to my husband, lover of projects and perfection and audiovisual equipment: 5.1 surround sound with wall-mounted rear channels and strategically placed sub-woofer, all channeled to a 55-inch 4K HDTV through a quality stereo receiver. Naturally, the children had commandeered that situation in order to watch episodes of Bluey and YouTube videos of exuberant adults reading children's books on this particular cold and drizzly day, so I ended up watching it on a cracked phone screen while I made macaroni and cheese from a box. #ThatMomLifeTho
I went into the film relatively clueless. I knew that it was about the man who wrote Rent (which I still have never seen, but “Seasons of Love” is a bop and a half). I was intrigued by the idea of Andrew Garfield in a musical. But the clincher was the phrase “Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut.” I’m a basic white girl, when the leaves turn orange I buy a pumpkin spice latte and when LMM does literally anything, I sign up for it. I am who I am.
I expected to like it. I didn’t expect to love it as much as I do, nor did I anticipate how many tears it would induce me to shed while my 4-year-old and 2-year-old vied for supremacy (a.k.a., the premium spot on my lap).
**Fair warning - Beyond this point lie spoilers a-plenty for Tick, Tick…BOOM! If you haven’t seen it yet and spoilers bother you, remedy that.**
Jonathan Larson turned thirty years old in 1990, eight months before I was born. He wrote the award-winning Broadway classic RENT. On paper, we could not be more different, but after watching Andrew Garfield’s performance in this amazing film adaptation, I couldn’t help but feel that “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” (Maybe not quite to that extent, but I feel like these lovely words are completely wasted on the toxic train wreck that is Cathy and Heathcliff, all due respect to Emily Brontë.) With each passing frame, I felt more and more invested in Jonathan’s trajectory.
While I am nowhere near a Tony award-winning composer, I am a creative person whose well has seemingly run dry. Several years ago I cranked out material at an alarming rate, self-publishing at least one book a year and sometimes more than that, all while working full-time. Now, the quality wasn’t very good, because I was young and inexperienced and didn’t take the time to carefully develop my craft or seek the help of others. Nevertheless, words made it to page and books made it to press. The lower half of a bookshelf in my bedroom, the one hidden behind the open door, bears proof of this - several copies that have never sold and likely never will, my name repeating from spine to spine in a uniformity that unnerves me.
But when I was pregnant with my first daughter, who is now four and a half years old, something inside of me shriveled up. I attributed it at first to the physical and mental demands of pregnancy, and then once she was born the exhaustion of new motherhood. Slowly, story ideas started coming back to me, to the point where I have several books fully fleshed out in my mind. The problem comes when I try to actually write them. I find myself rewriting the same five chapters over and over and over, never seeming to find the strength I need to crest the wave and speed toward the finish line. This is the ugly truth: I have been trying to write Grief, Vinyl, and Other Methods of Time Travel since my oldest child was two weeks old; Winner Bakes it All since she was six months. Needless to say, the scene where Jonathan painstakingly types out “you’re,” then erases it and types “your,” then back to “you’re,” was very relatable. I laughed the first time I watched it. The second time, I cried.
I saw myself in the most unhealthy parts of Jonathan - his self-centeredness, the neglect of everything from his immediate living conditions to his most treasured relationships, his short temper and his increasing panic. My chest tightens thinking of the many scenes where he has forgotten, and is once more reminded, about something important he’s blown off, from a job his best friend has arranged for him to his girlfriend’s ultimatum to the fact that he can’t get his agent to return his calls. I see my worst self in the reflection of his rock bottom, and I didn’t know it was possible to feel equal amounts of empathy and hatred.
There’s also the uncomfortable fact that I too turned thirty in the middle of a pandemic, one that was unnecessarily politicized and disproportionately affected marginalized groups. I also find myself wondering many of the same questions:
Why do we follow leaders who never lead?
Why does it take catastrophe to start a revolution?
If we're so free, tell me why?
Someone tell me why
So many people bleed?
Other things we have in common: While I’ve never showered in my kitchen, but I have lived in a tiny little one bedroom apartment with concrete floors and no heat. I’ve never waited tables, but I worked the drive thru of a fast food restaurant for five years, and the customer interactions were about the same (it seems). And while I’ve never seen a song form between the lines of tile at the bottom of a pool, I have awoken from a dream I can’t remember to know in my heart that a story has been born somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind, and all I have to do is dig it out.
This movie means so much to me as a writer with creative blockage, as someone with anxiety and depression and ADHD (which I don’t want to diagnose either real or fictionalized Jonathan with, but I see what I see), as someone who has turned 30 in the middle of a pandemic that some people just don’t seem to care about, and as someone who really thought they’d be a little bit further along at this point in their life. It is a beautiful film that I wholeheartedly recommend, even if you don’t usually like musicals. Andrew Garfield gives an amazing performance, as does the rest of the cast, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
