Gifts of Heaven, or My Lynn Cohen story.

In May of 2002 I had just finished my MFA and honestly didn't know where I was. I didn't want to be an actor anymore, I didn't know how to be a writer yet, a girl I had been waiting seven years to call my partner suddenly ghosted on me. I had wandered clear off the map and didn't know it. (Some of you might recognize this as chapter one of my "Deborah Craig Saved My Life" story.)

Out of the clear blue I got a call from a theater company I had worked with before (2G) to do a reading of a then-new play.  Lloyd Suh's The Children of Vonderly. The reading was at The Public, and I had never worked there before so I said "sure I can do that." I had literally nothing else to do and was very grateful for the invitation.

It was a very different play from what it would eventually become, and it was a very different time from a casting perspective. I was asked to play an adoptee who used a wheelchair: two things I had zero real-world experience with. I'd like to think that these days that offer would not even have come my way. But that's what it was. Most of the cast played adoptees to the titular [deceased] Vonderly in that piece, and Lynn played our matriarch. I think I may have been the oldest sibling (surprise surprise). I might be remembering this wrong, forgive me Lloyd, it was eighteen years ago. There was a passage in it where I had to describe heaven. I had to tell her what I thought her husband was doing in heaven, why we shouldn’t mourn him. When I initially read the passage I knew exactly what it was. Lloyd's prose is as purposeful as it is rich. It wasn’t the emotional apex of the story, and it certainly wasn’t intended to be a meal. But it had weight to it. Which was disconcerting only because I had been two years out of practice and a little unsure of myself.

But in rehearsal Lynn was sitting there next to me listening and at one point she put her hand on mine, never breaking eye contact. She didn’t say anything. She just held my hand and listened. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. But in that brief exchange her energy occupied my person like a warm hug and I had permission to feel again. Suddenly, I couldn’t make it through that passage. I literally could not read the page through my tears. I knew even then that on this third day of our 29 hour reading I wasn’t mourning my adoptive father, or the children and wife he left behind. I was mourning the end of my life as an actor, the end of the future I thought I wanted with ghost girl, the end of my twenties, the end of a New York City I had come of age in. (This was less than nine months after 9/11.) And because Lynn held my hand, it was all okay. It was all a gift from heaven.

I would meet her again four more times in my life and four more times she would have no recollection of who I was. I would never remind her, as I was a completely different person in 2002 and it seemed fitting that during a time in which I had so little lasting memory, the week that I spent with her might only be conjecture. Might only be something that existed because it couldn’t be disproven.

See, I may not be able to prove that I did a reading at the Public, or that I once worked with the world famous Lynn Cohen on a Lloyd Suh play. But I can prove that I knew her because she gave me permission to breathe again. Thank you, Lynn for giving us all permission to breathe again.