I held the wrinkled grey card up to my face, comparing the address printed on it to the one crookedly affixed to the façade of the building in front of me.  Above the address on the card simply read The Playhouse. The building itself featured no such identification.

I’d received the card after leaving work the previous day. I left my employer’s office, a squat brick structure situated on the border of the seedier side of town. Afterwards I walked down the street to the bus stop where public transportation took me home every day. As I took my seat in the old, dilapidated shelter, I noticed a man in a tattered green coat approaching me from down the street. He looked like he’d seen better days. I assumed he was going to beg for money, having been hassled by beggars previously in the area.

I fished some change out of my pocket hoping he would take it and move along. However, he ignored my outstretched hand when I held it out.

“Hey,” he said, “do you want to see a play?”

“A play?” I asked.

“A play,” he replied, “a theatrical performance.”

Before I had a chance to answer, he looked down at my still open palm, but didn’t take any of the coins I’d produced early. Instead, he handed me the card.

“Tomorrow, seven P.M. This address.” He said, and began to walk away.

“Hold on,” I said, intrigued, “what is this play about?”

He turned around and pointed at me.

“It’s about you. It’s about me. It’s about all of them.” 

He pointed at the bus, which was now approaching the stop, and at the passengers inside of it. Then he spun around once more and hurried away around a corner.

I boarded the bus and headed home. The whole way I couldn’t stop thinking about that strange encounter. The mysterious theatrical performance and the way the man described it made me curious. I decided that I would attend, which was what led me to this moment, standing in front of The Playhouse holding its card, unsure of whether or not I was even at the right place.

The address was correct, but the building didn’t seem like it had been put to any use in some time. Its façade was cracked and peeling, and whatever sign that had once advertised the theater’s existence was obviously long gone.

Slightly disappointed, I began to think that the man who’d handed me the card was just some loon and that there had probably been no performances at this location for years.

However, when I gave the door a nudge, it opened up. Although I was still not convinced that the theater was open, I stepped inside. I was in a dimly lit lobby area. There were ropes set up leading to another room. I assumed them to be the queue, but there was no line of people present.

I followed the ropes through a set of double doors. Entering the room in front of me, I saw that I was indeed in a small theater. Rows of seats stretched out ahead of me, ending in front of a stage. A curtain was pulled across it.

At this point I was convinced that there was no show and that The Playhouse was nothing more than abandoned. I was about to leave when suddenly, the lights began to him, and overhead spotlights that I hadn’t even noticed were there trained themselves on the stage. Quickly, I slipped into a row and took a seat in the middle.

The curtain was pulled back and on the stage was a set resembling the living area of a common household. Four actors were currently on the stage – a mother, father, son, and daughter. Later, more characters made their way on and off stage. The same actors played multiple different people, leaving and coming back in a change of costume.

As I watched the show progress, I realized that it did not have any sort of main storyline or theme. It simply revolved around the life of this average family, the timeframe sped up and skipped through in a way so that week upon week of their daily goings-on could be observed by the audience –I being the only audience there was.

After I’d been sitting in the theater for some period of time, I began to feel that I understood these characters as if they were real human beings. I had a feel for their relationships, who they were, how they had matured and changed as time passed within the performance.

The acting was phenomenal. So good, in fact, that it had a disquieting effect on me. When the family wept over the death of one of the grandparents, or when the parents later fought over what to do about their teenage son’s rebelliousness, I felt as if I was intruding. It was just a performance, but I felt like I was a spy, casually observing these people’s most important and emotion-fraught moments. As I lost track of time watching the play, this feeling became more and more pronounced until I was uncomfortable enough to leave the theater altogether. 

As I hurried outside and to the bus stop, I stopped to wonder about the play. How could these actors draw out such profound emotion in portraying these fictional characters? Were the events that unfolded before my eyes in the theater not totally unimportant? How could such insignificant beings, people who were not even real outside of the context of their little theater, provoke what I felt?

I contemplated this further before I came to a realization; the answer was in what the man who gave me the card had told me when I asked him what the play was about. It was about everyone, me included. I was unsettled by those people up on the stage because something about them felt all too familiar. I was the same thing as they were.

Each and every day I immersed myself in my problems, my joys, my triumphs, my losses. I attributed to each of those a monumental importance. But what were they, really? In any greater scheme imaginable they were as insignificant as the happenings of the lives of those characters on stage, never affecting any sphere outside their own. My life was nothing but its own play on its own tiny stage at the end of a much greater and darker abyss, my empty playhouse.