After We Carried the Colors: A Post-Mortem of The Colors We Carry

There is a strange moment in the life of a playwright when the thing you wrote stops being yours. Not legally, of course. Let’s not get crazy. But creatively? Emotionally? Absolutely.

For months, The Colors We Carry existed inside my head, on my computer, in revisions, in conversations, and eventually in the hands of seven actors who agreed to trust me with something that was becoming far more personal than I originally intended. Then, over three performances at the St. Louis Fringe Festival, it belonged to the audience. And now that the first production is over, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what happened.

This is my attempt.

The Play I Thought I Was Writing

The Colors We Carry started with a fairly simple theatrical idea. Seven people. Seven colors. Seven pieces of the LGBTQIA+ experience.

I wanted to write about the things queer people carry with us: shame, fear, anger, joy, grief, memory, survival, and the complicated relationship we have with the generations that came before us and the generations coming after. I didn’t want to write a history lesson. I didn’t want seven characters standing onstage explaining important moments in queer history to an audience. And I definitely didn’t want to write something that treated queer existence as an endless parade of trauma. I wanted people. Funny people. Angry people. Messy people. People who had survived things. People who were still figuring things out. People who disagreed with each other. People who sometimes said exactly the wrong thing. Because that is what a community actually looks like.

Somewhere during the writing process, however, the play became something slightly different. It became less about the individual colors and more about what happens when you put them next to each other. That became the heart of the play. We carry our own stories. But we also carry each other's.

Then the Actors Got Hold of It

One of the most humbling experiences a playwright can have is hearing an actor say a line completely differently than it sounded in your head. Sometimes your immediate reaction is: "No. That's not how that goes." And then, five seconds later: "Oh. That's better."

That happened repeatedly during this production. Michael Cox, Jim Danek, Dustyn Barnett, Aarin Kamphoefner, Max Friedman, Daniel Horst, and Richard Matt-Zeitler didn't simply memorize seven roles. They found seven people. They found humor in places I hadn't realized were funny. They found pain in lines I hadn't realized hurt that much. They found relationships between the characters that weren't necessarily written explicitly on the page.And perhaps most importantly, they listened to each other.

There are moments in The Colors We Carry where the most important person onstage isn't the person speaking. It's the person hearing it. Watching those relationships develop taught me something about my own script. The play isn't seven monologues. It's a conversation. Sometimes across a room, generations, and even decades.

The Audience Changed the Play Too

You can workshop a script forever. You can read it around a table. You can ask actors what they think. You can rewrite a scene twenty-seven times. Eventually, though, you need strangers. Because an audience tells you things nobody else can.

They tell you where the silence lives. They tell you where the laugh actually is. They tell you when you've earned an emotional moment—and when you're trying too hard to manufacture one. And sometimes they tell you something simply by not moving.

There were moments during our performances when I could feel the room become completely still. As a playwright, that is terrifying because your brain immediately starts asking: Are they bored? Did this scene die? Did I completely misjudge this?

Then someone sniffles, or laughs, or exhales. And you realize they're with you. The response to this production was more than I expected. We received three standing ovations in three performances. People told us it was the best show they had seen at the festival. People told members of the cast that they recognized themselves in these characters. People talked about moments from the play afterward. And those conversations meant more to me than any trophy possibly could because that was the point.

I didn't want people simply to watch The Colors We Carry. I wanted them to carry something out of the theatre.

What Didn't Work

This is a post-mortem, so I'm not going to pretend everything was perfect. It wasn't. There are things I would change. There are moments that need more room to breathe. There are transitions I understand differently now that I've watched them with an audience. There are characters I want to know better. There are places where I can trust the audience more and explain less. That's probably the biggest lesson I learned.

Trust the audience.

Writers are terrified of being misunderstood. So we explain. Then we explain the explanation. Then, just to make absolutely certain everyone got it, another character walks in and explains it again. Audiences are smarter than that.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is give them the pieces and allow them to make the connection themselves. I learned that watching this play. There were moments when audiences understood what I was doing before the script told them. Those are the moments I want to protect as the play continues developing.

The Thing I Didn't Expect

I knew The Colors We Carry was queer theatre. Obviously.

What I didn't fully understand until people started responding to it was how much the play was about inheritance. Not biological inheritance but emotional inheritance.

Every generation inherits something from the generation before it. Sometimes that's progress or trauma. Sometimes it's language and sometimes it's fear. Sometimes it's the privilege of never having to fight a battle because somebody twenty years earlier already fought it for you. And sometimes we don't realize we're carrying any of it.

That idea became much more important to me after seeing the production. There is a tendency to talk about LGBTQIA+ history as though it is finished history. Stonewall happened. The AIDS crisis happened. Marriage equality happened. Put them in the textbook and turn the page. But history doesn't work that way.

People are still alive who remember when being openly gay could destroy their careers. People are still alive who buried friend after friend during the AIDS crisis. And young queer people are growing up in a world that is simultaneously more accepting than anything previous generations imagined and still frighteningly capable of moving backward. Those people are standing next to each other right now.

That is The Colors We Carry.

About the Award We Didn't Win

I debated whether to include this. But a post-mortem that only discusses the comfortable parts isn't particularly useful.

We didn't win Fringemeister. Of course I wanted to. I'm not going to perform the artistic ritual where we're supposed to pretend recognition doesn't matter. It matters.

Artists work incredibly hard on these things. Recognition feels good. Awards can help a show's future life. And when you've watched audiences stand at the end of every performance and heard people tell you how deeply the work affected them, of course some part of you starts wondering whether your show's name might be called.

It wasn't. I was disappointed. Probably more than I expected to be. And then something interesting happened. The play was still the play. Those audiences still stood. Those conversations still happened. Those actors still gave everything they had.

Nothing about what we accomplished disappeared because someone else's name was announced. That doesn't mean awards are meaningless. It means they aren't measurements. Art is too strange for that.

What Happens Now

This is the part I didn't expect to be writing so soon.

The Colors We Carry isn't finished. In fact, I think this first production proved that it is only beginning.

The script is now available for purchase and performance licensing, which means these seven colors can eventually belong to seven completely different actors in a completely different theatre. That thought is simultaneously thrilling and terrifying.

There are also new opportunities beginning to emerge for the piece, including the chance to present an abbreviated version a Queer event next June. And I want to keep developing the script. Not because the Fringe production failed to accomplish what I wanted. Because it succeeded enough to show me what else might be possible.

That may be the greatest gift a first production can give a playwright. Not an ending. A direction.

What I Carry From It

I started writing The Colors We Carry because I wanted to say something about queer history, identity, community, and survival. I finished the first production realizing that the play had something to say back to me. It reminded me why I make theatre.

Not for awards. Not for reviews, which were so appreciated. Not even for standing ovations, although I will happily take those.

I make theatre because, for a little while, strangers sit together in a dark room and agree to care about the same people. They laugh together. They hurt together. They remember together. Then the lights come up and everyone leaves carrying something they didn't have when they walked in.

That is theatre.

And for three performances, seven actors stood beneath seven colors and carried something I wrote farther than I ever could have carried it by myself. Now we find out where it goes next.

We lived.

We healed.

We remained.

And we're still carrying the colors.

— Jordan Matt-Zeitler