In
February of 2003, a fire destroyed the Station Nightclub
in West Warwick, Rhode Island. One hundred lives were
lost. This tragedy, among the worst nightclub fires in
American history, had a traumatic effect on the people
of Rhode Island. The youngest of the one hundred victims,
barely eighteen, was my brother Nicholas. Already an accomplished
actor and musician, Nick was a beloved member of the Rhode
Island arts community. He was, of course, far more than
that to my family.
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In
some families, there is that one child. Not everyone
would understand. Particular spans in age or family
structures may have something to do with it. But
for some families, there’s one child, blessed
with a peculiar warmth, humor, strength and intuition,
whose existence ties everyone else closer together,
one child who is the mover and the standard for
measurement of time and space and energy.
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For us, that was Nicky. He was ten years my junior and
as they years passed, I grew to realize that he was more
like a son to me than a little brother. He was equal parts
golden cherub and grinning imp, innocent/wise, manic/serene,
dazzling/quiet, unassuming/unforgettable, brilliant in
all the most unconventional ways. Nick was more than glue
for my family; he was its beating, glowing heart, and
he was my best friend.
New Agers talk about Indigo Children, these system-busting
tornadoes of wonderment who expect to be treated like
royalty. And yes, Nicky found endless hilarity in his
ability to absolutely lord over my mom’s daycare
kids (including Nicky’s own best friend, Damian,
who did indeed start off as a daycare kid). But to describe
Nicky, to sum up his life in a phrase—Nicky was
giving. Giving, selfless, physically affectionate in a
way that boys usually are not, and from the youngest age,
the very guardian of happiness, the youngest Catcher in
the Rye (another story that, like our own, prominently
features carousels). No one could ever be sad. That wouldn’t
stand. If he was royalty, he was the enlightened monarch
of Cranston.
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At
the age of ten he discovered performing. Publicly,
that is; he’d been imitating Elvis and Michael
Jackson in the living room his whole life, not to
mention doing dead-on impressions of everyone we knew
behind their backs. And when he discovered theatre,
we all discovered theatre. |
Now Bill sings opera and I do this directing thing. It
all started with that 1995 church youth ministry production
of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown: Nicky
as tiny precocious Linus, Billy as a lanky teenage beagle.
I ran the spotlight and inwardly critiqued the director’s
every decision.
In 1997, a coin-toss twist of fate landed me, then an
AmeriCorps volunteer, in overcrowded Woonsocket Middle
School, directing my first play, The Wizard of Oz.
A boy from the school dropped out of the Scarecrow role,
and Nicky slipped in quietly. Playing the Scarecrow, Dorothy’s
innocent and guileless loyal friend, made a sort of indelible
impact on Nicky, just as playing the Lion made a lifelong
impact on a very determined WMS 8th grader named Matt.
The two boys had a loose and jumpy chemistry even then,
and the play became this beautiful obsession for them.
Nick and Matt did wind up back together. More unexpected
turns brought them both, years later, to a place called
the Stadium Theatre, which is just about the cultural
Mecca of northern Rhode Island. When we stumbled into
the place, to join an amateur song-and-dance fundraising
group—the Encore Entertainers. Nick and Matt, charming
and bright, were the company’s greatest young hopes.
In 1999 I inherited the directorship of the Encore Entertainers.
After a first successful production gave me a little bit
of leeway, Nicky and I hatched a scheme to give him the
chance to try out one of his long-time dreams—improvisational
comedy before a live audience. When the main stage closed
for renovations, I staged two cabaret shows in the lobby.
Giving Nick at age 14 and Matt at 16 the chance to perform
improv had to be slipped under the producer’s radar,
and it was risky. If they failed it could have been an
awful blow to their self-esteem and to the group’s
developing reputation. Nevertheless, in the autumn of
1999, Nicky and Matt stepped onstage in between a couple
of songs (and two buffet tables full of Swedish meatballs
and salad) and very bluntly started asking the confused
audience for suggestions.
Nick and Matt killed. Soon people were coming,
and coming back, just to see them. The ushers all made
it a point to drop what they were doing and rush out to
see these two boys humiliate people in the audience, squeeze
new life out of the oldest vaudeville gags, and take on
the fiercest (and drunkest) hecklers. With their relaxed
wiseass/ dummy chemistry, they were upstaging our best
singers and dancers. People started booking them for gigs
and private parties.
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There
was by now a general consensus that Nicky—our
Nicky—could do pretty much anything. And yet,
at home, he was still Nicky. Our life—our normal,
real life—revolved around playing N64, taking
walks to Walgreens, looking forward to annual trips
to Disney World—Nicky’s favorite place
in the world—and watching a whole lot of TV
together. He was still Nicky—adamant in his
refusal to grow up, and smarter than everyone else
because of it. |
In
May of 2000, my little group—now the Encore Repertory
Company—presented its first full-length musical,
Bye Bye Birdie. Nick, who may have been born
to play Conrad Birdie, didn’t have to try very hard,
and neither did the gaggle of teenage girls whose job
it was to fawn over him.
After that show I departed from Encore, but Nick and Matt
stayed around and had a chance, that summer, to fulfill
their long-time dream. They reprised Scarecrow and Lion
in a (relatively) big-budget grown-up way, and Nick told
me they wept a little backstage before going on, with
their hands on each other’s shoulders. Nick left
Encore after that. The group’s producer asked him
to take an extended leave from the company after he demolished
a table while demonstrating a pro wrestling move on Matt.
We would talk and talk about going back to the Stadium,
which was now beautiful in its full renovation, but instead
we floated around and did things like Song of Mark,
a liturgical musical about the Passion story that marked
the last time Nicky, Billy and myself would ever work
together on a project. Immediately after that, I moved
to Boston for grad school and Billy took off for California
to chase the girl of his dreams. And Nicky and I were
both miserable pretty much all the time. The week I left,
Nick sent me a long
e-mail, all about how this felt like the final nail in
the coffin of his childhood, that he was losing his hold
on the person he had been his whole life. And I wrote
back and told him that the child inside him would never
die—that it was the truest part of him. I didn’t
know if that stayed with him or not because he didn’t
write back.
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Nick
still acted, now almost exclusively with the All-Children’s
Theatre (ACT), but his real focus now was on being
a full time rock star with his band Shryne. That’s
Shryne with a Y because, Nick would say, spelling
anything with a Y is cool. Now Nick was fending off
groupies; now they were calling him mini-Mick (as
in Jagger) all over the Providence clubs. Nick and
his rock babe Gabby, Nick the singer/songwriter, the
great Nicky O. But still, at home, still just Nicky.
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Nicky who went from place to place, from crowd to crowd,
trying on different masks and playing different roles—and
getting each one right—looking, I think, for the
place where he’d most belong. Still (now more than
ever, in fact), Nicky was the truest real-life Catcher
in the Rye (which I tried to get him to read; he
wasn’t really the reading type). He was, like Holden
Caulfield, hopeful, longing and at the same time bewildered
by the world, by people, by the pain they inflict upon
one another, and most of all by the appalling inevitability
of growing up. Our home, at least, had been an anchor,
and now, we learned, we were losing that too. After the
death of my father a year earlier, my mom had fallen behind
on the payments and could no longer afford to keep up
with it. The house went up for sale, and our only prospect
was for Nicky and my mom to move in with my grandmother,
in a cramped house in Providence. For Nicky, it felt like
all the goodness and joy was being suddenly, quickly drained
out of his life.
In
February of 2002, I received from Nicky the first draft
of a play he had suddenly written about three guardian
angels—a girl named Grace, a boy named Levi, and
a third spirit named Cyrus who was clearly supposed to
be Nicky himself. Recently deceased, they meander around
New York, chatting and bickering, reminiscing about their
funerals, frustrated by humans’ inability to see
them, angered by the world’s wretchedness, mystified
by God’s seeming inaction, and relentlessly delivering
a message of hope to an anguished young man named Adam
Tyler and a street corner fortune teller, Mama Marie.
The message expressed itself in different forms, but its
final delivery was straightforward and simple: “Do
not fear to hope.” The play seemed to have sprung
from an allegedly true story I used to tell Nicky when
he was little, but his imagination (or, as he would say,
“inspiration”) had run off with it, and he
had inserted himself into the tale. The play was called
They Walk Among Us.
I think Nick was unsure of the writing. I gave him a lot
of feedback and some suggestions, and he told me in response
that I just hadn’t really gotten it—“at
all”—and then I didn’t hear anything
about it again.
The mysteries that followed from after that time are beyond
the scope of this writing, but they are very much the
subject of the 41.
The
pain of loss is beyond the capability of our language
to express. It is the most violent, cataclysmic and cruel
of realities. Its casualties are motivation, hope, and
the past. And the future. It is a dumb, stubborn thing.
It turns the brightest memories against you.
This
project is not just about that pain or those things, but
that needs to be said. This project is also not about
my mother, even though so much of what I personally have
done in the past years has been for her and in response—dire,
desperate response—to her unimaginable misery. We
may or may not be strong because of what we have done
in Nicky’s name; it was all that we could
do. It is the part of me that won’t go gently into
a long dark tunnel with only more darkness at its end
and call that the remainder of my life, leaving eighteen
years of happiness to sit under a coating of dust, allowing
my family’s once vibrant and always laughing existence
drift into a long extended trite and hollow conversation
about “moving on” and “letting go.”
We had never known trauma, and now we were there, inside
of that word, and that would not stand. This could not
be about moving on from, it would be about moving on with,
and the world needed to see this, and to recognize this,
and to know this. It was for this reason that even a week
after the fire, we launched a celebration—celebration—of
Nick’s life, greatly to the surprise of many who
had come prepared to mourn. But Nicky didn’t want
anyone to be sad.
Just like that, four years after last walking out the
door of St. Jude’s, the church parish where we’d
been brought up, we were back, and for something unimaginable—a
memorial service for Nicky. Like Nicky says in his song
“Forgotten Bliss,” which played that
night, filling the space, “Oh my darling, please
take me back home.”
Nicky, who had spent his last feverish few years trying
to figure out where he fit, brought together on that night
eleven hundred people.
And
a year later, They Walk Among Us saw its first
audience.
To sum up the rehearsal process in a phrase: purity of
purpose. This feeling, capping off that awful year, was
itself a kind of alchemy-aimlessness turned into pure
drive. I wasn’t alone. A fierce dedication had poured
forth from this community. I spent this time worrying,
working and reading everything Nicky ever wrote, and especially
his writings from the painful final year of his life:
his hard, irresistible journals, poems and songs, eerie
and prophetic, and dreaming and bleeding.
There were no bios in the program. Instead, actors wrote
testimonials about Nicky—and who he had been to
them. In much the same spirit, my Director’s Note
read just as follows:
He walks among us
A year ago, there were no words. Language felt inadequate.
Everyone's lives (everyone who still lived) became a literal
nightmare and we all said, again and again, there are
no words, there are no words.
Now there are words.
A year ago, my family looked upon the prospect—the
unearned prison sentence of a long life devoid of meaning,
because the person around whom our lives had centered
for eighteen years was torn, was ripped away, ridiculously,
impossibly, and suddenly. Instantly we were on the other
side of the nightly news; and everyone else was clutching
their children close to them in gratitude, because we
could not anymore. We looked upon the absurd prospect
of years filled not with Nick but with the emptiness he
left behind.
We have come to learn otherwise.
We began to learn this when eleven hundred people attended
his memorial service; and in this, we think Nick learned
some things also—about the purpose of his own life.
That was the beginning of a year that has been as full
of wonder and hope as it has been of shock and stinging
separation. In the aftermath of horror, there has been
the amazing, stunning blessing of Nick's continued presence;
of signs and signals that have defied a thousand times
over all rational logic (and on occasion the laws of physics),
synchronicities that stand far outside suspicion of coincidence,
and miracles that have extinguished our fear of death.
It would be impossible to share with you every story,
but our hope is that tonight we might share some of the
hope. Although our sadness will never end, although we
all might wish every second that we could have him back,
to see the man he would have become...it is possible to
transform sorrow into meaning.
In fact, it may be the whole point.
Yes—Nick wrote a single play in his life, completing
it less than a year before the fire, and it was about
teenagers who have died and become guardian angels, and
one of them is clearly supposed to be Nick himself. This
is not some fabrication—this is a part of the Wonder
and the Hope. Tonight you will be among the first people
in the world to see this play performed. You will also
see his friends—just a few of the many whose lives
were touched deeply by Nicky. You will see them singing
and dancing and acting, in tribute and in reflection.
They will each say what they need to say. We are glad
to give them the chance.
But most of all—I promise you—you will see
Nicky.
—Chris
O'Neill
