Theater Kid

The harsh fluorescent lights in the drama classroom hummed over Jason’s head. He locked his attention onto the southern Oregon rain hammering against the windows, turning the parking lot outside into a mirror that reflected nothing back but gray. It was October 1987, and Jason Hartley was sixteen years old. He sat in the back row of folding chairs, his shoulders hunched to make his body as small as possible. What the hell am I doing here?

Through the rain-streaked glass, he saw the parking lot’s charging stations. To him, those boxy retrofitted units looked like they’d been designed by someone who imagined a future that was all right angles and chrome. A plugged-in Honda’s dashboard screen glowed pale green through the windshield. Jason’s car was ancient compared to that. He still went to the pump.

“You’ll love drama class,” Lenora had told him a few weeks earlier, leaning against his locker with that casual confidence of a high school senior with no plans. Her dyed platinum hair and heavy black eyeliner enchanted him. Jason fell half in love with her the moment she’d asked him for a cigarette behind the gym. She only liked girls though. “Drama’s easy,” she said. “And Mr. Carlson is cool. Plus, you’ve got that thing.”

“Thing, what thing?”

Lenora grinned and stuck out the tip of her tongue. “Ooh, don’t play modest. You know… You’re watchable. You’ve got a face card.”

“Whatever that means,” and he pushed her away, gently.

Jason had a face at least, a long, angular one that seemed to care too much, which wasn’t far from the truth. At home, he knew his mother was strapped into her Skren ComfortView headset as early as three o’clock, settled into her bed with an overflowing ashtray and a Margaret Atwood novel she’d never finish. The headset visor’s soft blue glow would be seeping from the edges, casting shadows on her face as she disappeared into medical training simulations or soap opera feeds. His father was likely in his own room, door closed. He’d be sealed inside his Skren SonoScape headset listening to NPR archives with the volume turned low like he was afraid someone might hear him existing.

Despite all that, things were better now than they used to be. Jason remembered the years before his mother got her nursing degree. His elementary school nights spent hearing the screaming matches, eating food-stamp frozen dinners, seeing his father’s arms crossed as he gave up fighting and retreated to his small bedroom. Now there was money for groceries without checking the bank balance every day. Now his parents just avoided each other instead of destroying each other. Progress, Jason supposed, though the house still felt like a museum where everyone tiptoed around exhibits they were afraid to touch. Except now the inhabitants wore headsets and nobody had to talk to each other at all.

“Let’s start with some warm-ups,” the drama class teacher Mr. Carlson said with a clap of his hands. He was young for a teacher, early thirties, with a neat beard and wire-rimmed glasses. Everyone knew he lived with his “roommate” Derek in a house on the edge of town. Nobody said anything about it, but everyone knew. “Jason, we haven’t put you on the spot yet. Come on up here.”

Jason’s stomach dropped. So much for invisibility. Around him, the other students—mostly girls and a handful of guys who wore vintage clothes from the Goodwill—watched with the kind of neutral curiosity they’d give a new species at the zoo.

“For this exercise, I want you to walk across the stage like you’re late for something important.”

Jason stood slowly and walked across the makeshift stage area, feeling his classmates’ eyes follow him as he picked up speed.

Mr. Carlson scratched his chin when Jason stopped. “Okay, try it again. But this time, believe it. What are you late for?”

“I don’t know. Class?”

“Make it matter, something life or death.”

Jason tried again, and something clicked. He imagined he was late getting home, about to miss his mother before she finished her third beer and disappeared into her visor for the night, before his father sealed himself in his audio tomb. His stride changed.

“There,” Mr. Carlson said with a smile. “That’s it. You felt that, right?”

Jason nodded, breathless, embarrassed by how much he had felt it, how much he enjoyed it.

The auditions for The Odd Couple were held on a Wednesday afternoon. Jason had never auditioned before, but he did his best to hide his teenage desperation. He read for several parts, stumbling over Neil Simon’s rapid-fire dialogue but finding something in Oscar Madison’s slouching defeat seemed to suit him.

The part of Oscar went to a senior. Jason got cast as Vinnie, one of the poker players. It was a nothing part, barely any lines. But it was something to him. Lenora hugged him when the cast list went up, and he could smell cigarettes and Aqua Net in her hair.

“See?” she said. “Face card.” She tapped his nose and strutted away.

After that, rehearsals became the center of his universe. The drama room was more welcoming than home, safer. The other kids laughed at jokes Jason made without meaning to be funny. Mr. Carlson called him “a natural” once, and Jason held onto those words.

A junior named Beth played the bit character Cecily. She had braces and a laugh like synth chimes. During a break between scenes, she sat next to him in the back row and shared her Red Vines.

“You’re good,” she said.

Jason chuckled. “I have like three lines.”

“Yeah, but you make them count. You’re not just saying them. You know?”

He didn’t know, but he took the compliment.

After rehearsal one evening, Jason found Mr. Carlson backstage reviewing footage on a Skren MiyoVox Pro-48, one of those chunky shoulder-mounted camcorders that had flooded the market after the engineers at Skren figured out how to cram AI analysis into consumer electronics. The machine sat on the prop table, its boxy black body catching the stage lights, chrome accents glinting. Mr. Carlson watched the tiny flip-out screen, scrolling through blocky green text.

“What’s it say?” Jason asked.

Mr. Carlson looked up, smiling and slightly startled. “Honestly? I don’t pay much attention to the metrics. But it’s good for reviewing blocking, seeing what the audience sees.” He tilted the screen toward Jason. Numbers scrolled past: ENGAGEMENT METRIC 7.4/10.0. GESTURE AUTHENTICITY 82% OPTIMAL. “The machine thinks we did pretty good, actually.”

Jason stared at the numbers. A door opened in his mind. Someone at RadioShack was selling used MiyoVox units for two hundred bucks. Jason had been saving money from his job at the 7-Eleven, originally planning to buy a better car stereo. But the idea of seeing himself the way others saw him, of having a machine tell him exactly what worked and what didn’t, it felt like the answer to a question he had been too afraid to ask.

He bought the MiyoVox the next Saturday, carried it home in its foam-lined case like it was made of crystal.

Jason’s bedroom became a studio. He set up the MiyoVox on his desk, angled toward the space where his bed met the wall. After his parents retreated to their separate rooms—his mother’s door clicking shut at 8:30, his father’s at 9:00—Jason pulled out monologues from the plays Mr. Carlson had lent him and performed for the camera.

The MiyoVox recorded for as long as the VHS–C cartridge had space, then Jason rewound and watched himself on the tiny screen. After thirty seconds of mechanical whirring, the analysis scrolled across the display:

PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS COMPLETE.

The synthesized voice emanated from the tinny speaker, each syllable pronounced with equal emphasis and no natural rhythm: “I am pleased to inform. Analysis is now complete.”

Words popped up in green text:

ENGAGEMENT METRIC: 5.8/10.0 VOCAL PROJECTION: INSUFFICIENT EYE-LINE DEPTH: 41% OPTIMAL RANGE

The voice continued, “I regret to inform that vocal projection is insufficient quality. Eye-line depth demonstrates 41 percent of optimal range parameter. It is highly advised to increase volume parameter by twenty percent and maintain eye-line depth intensity. Thank you for your cooperation with MiyoVox system.”

Jason rewound, tried again. Louder this time. Looking intently at a spot on the wall. He watched the numbers climb: 6.2. Then 6.9. Then 7.4.

Each increase felt like a reward. He was getting better. The machine told him so.

He spent hours this way, The Smiths and The Cure playing softly from his boombox while he performed and re-recorded, over and over. After a while he stopped watching himself in the playbacks; he only saw the machine’s analysis. His mother never knocked. His father never emerged. The house was three people in three rooms, all of them engaged with their devices, all of them alone.

Days later, after sharing more of her Red Vines, Beth kissed him behind the stage curtains. Jason felt like he was performing, and Beth was his audience. They hooked up twice more after that, once in her car, once in his. Both times were fumbling and brief; Beth didn’t seem to mind.

But even as it was happening, part of Jason wondered what engagement metric he would score, calculating how he could improve it.

The Odd Couple ran for six nights. Jason’s parents didn’t come to any of them. His mother said she had a shift, which was probably true. His father said he didn’t “really get that kind of thing,” which was definitely true. Jason told himself he didn’t care, and almost believed it.

A year went by.

David Brennan was a legend in their small town’s theater scene, a director who had almost made it in Los Angeles before crawling back to southern Oregon to torture high school students and community theater actors. He wore a salt and pepper ponytail and a scarf even in summer. When he announced auditions for Mother Hicks, half the drama class signed up just for the opportunity to work with him.

Jason followed the crowd and auditioned, expecting nothing. He got cast in the ensemble, as a nameless member of the Depression-era chorus. He could count his lines on one hand; the part was mostly reactions and movement. It should have been disappointing, but David made it sound important.

“The chorus is the soul of this piece,” David announced at the first rehearsal, pacing the stage without making any eye contact. “You are the voice of poverty, of America’s forgotten. I need you to dig deep, to bleed.”

This was met by nervous laughter from the cast, but Jason took it to heart.

He brought the MiyoVox to the second rehearsal. During a break, he recorded himself running through the crowd movements, and watched the playback in the corner of the room. The small screen flickered with green text:

GESTURE AUTHENTICITY: 73% OPTIMAL SPATIAL AWARENESS: ACCEPTABLE RANGE

“I am pleased to inform that gesture authenticity demonstrates improvement factor—”

“What the FUCK is that?”

Jason looked up. David stood over him, face red, veins visible on his neck.

“It’s just… I’m reviewing my blocking…”

“You’re feeding yourself into a goddamn machine. You think you can engineer your way to a genuine performance?” David grabbed the MiyoVox and looked at the scrolling metrics with disgust. “This is what’s killing theater. You kids with your screens and optimization. GET OUT. Come back when you’re ready to bleed for real, not for a fucking algorithm.”

Jason’s face burned. With hands that shook he packed up the MiyoVox and left. He sat in his car in the parking lot for half an hour, wanting to cry but unable to. Instead he drowned his thoughts with booming Big Black songs combined with rain drumming on the roof.

But he came back to rehearsal the next day. This time, he left the MiyoVox in his car and stayed after rehearsal to practice his movements. He memorized everyone else’s blocking so he would never be in the wrong place. He watched David work with the leads and absorbed everything about the way he coaxed performances out of them, the way he made them strip away their defenses until something raw and real emerged. Jason craved that rawness.

But at night, alone in his room, Jason couldn’t resist the MiyoVox’s gaze. He secretly recorded himself. He grinned to himself while watching the metrics climb: 7.8, then 8.3, then 8.9. He knew David would hate it, but the numbers felt like certified proof that he was improving. He mattered to something, even if it was just a machine.

One night after a particularly brutal rehearsal where David screamed at the cast for five straight minutes about being too calculated and mechanical, Jason came home to find his mother already sealed in her ComfortView, and his father already locked in his SonoScape tomb. The house was silent except for the quiet hum of their headsets’ audio.

Jason took out the MiyoVox in the hallway. He pointed it at his mother’s cracked door. Through the gap, he could see her lying on the bed, with the bulky visor strapped to her face, its thick cable snaking down to the beige console box on the floor. The soft blue glow at the edges of the headset illuminated her curling cigarette smoke. She didn’t move, wasn’t aware of anything in the physical world around her.

Jason recorded her for two minutes; then he moved to his father’s door. There he found the same thing. His father sat upright in a chair, the bulky SonoScape headphones covering his ears. His eyes stayed fixed on the primitive screen that displayed NPR audio waveforms and scrolling transcripts. He nodded slightly, but to what? To nothing Jason could see in the real world.

Back in his bedroom, Jason played the footage. The MiyoVox whirred through its analysis cycle, and the green text scrolled:

PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS COMPLETE.

“I regret to inform. No subject engagement is detected.”

SUBJECTS: NON-RESPONSIVE TO ENVIRONMENT UNABLE TO CALCULATE PERFORMANCE METRIC ANALYSIS ERROR ANALYSIS ERROR

Jason cued up Ministry’s “Thieves” on his boombox, and turned it up until the grinding, industrial rhythm rattled his desk. The driving percussion matched the pounding in his chest. He rewatched the footage of his parents and felt like he was documenting the end of his childhood.

At the final dress rehearsal for Mother Hicks, Jason stopped thinking about the MiyoVox’s metrics. He simply performed, letting himself feel the emptiness of Depression-era poverty.

David watched the final scene in silence. When the house lights came up, he closed his eyes and nodded once.

“Better,” he said to the cast. Then, looking directly at Jason: “You’re almost there.”

That night, Jason recorded the same performance in his room, running through his movements and reactions. The MiyoVox analyzed it:

ENGAGEMENT METRIC: 6.4/10.0

Jason stared at the number. At rehearsal, he’d felt more present than ever before. David had acknowledged it, but the machine gave him a worse score.

For the first time, Jason wondered if the numbers meant anything at all, or if they were just arbitrary calculations made by a flawed machine.

Megan Summers had perfect hair: Raven dark with just a hint of blood-red and feathered like she’d stepped out of a Tiger Beat magazine. She was a junior, one year younger than him, popular without being mean about it, and so far out of Jason’s orbit that he never considered talking to her.

She came to opening night of Mother Hicks. Jason spotted her in the third row during curtain call and nearly forgot to bow.

After the show, she found him by the audience check-in table.

“You were amazing,” she said, and her smile was so bright that he couldn’t stop looking at it.

“I didn’t really have any lines.”

“I know. But I watched you the whole time. You were so... present.”

Present. Jason turned the word over in his mind. At home, he was invisible. At school, he was just another random guy. But on stage, even without lines, he was present.

They started officially dating in January. She wore his jacket even though it was too big. She held his hand in the hallways and out in public downtown. She took him to parties and made sure everyone knew he was hers.

Jason wanted to be more than arm candy, to find something beneath the surface. He saved up enough money from his 7-Eleven shifts to rent a Skren VidLink booth at the mall. The booth was larger than a phone booth, with a built-in camera and a screen. You recorded your message onto a compact cassette-style cartridge, mailed it, and three to five days later the recipient could play it on their home console. It cost two dollars a minute, but felt important.

Jason recorded a message to Megan about a play he’d been reading, filling out his college applications, how he wanted to get to know her better. He talked for six minutes, twelve dollars gone in a conversation with himself.

Megan’s response arrived a week later. Jason loaded the cartridge into his family’s SkrenVid player—a boxy console that connected to the TV—and watched. The compression artifacts were distracting, and the audio sync slightly off. Megan smiled at the camera as she talked about a new necklace she’d bought, and drama with her friends. “Turn to Gold” played quietly in the background. She looked beautiful, but the message was eight minutes of nothing.

Out of curiosity, Jason replayed the cartridge while recording the TV with his MiyoVox unit. The text scrolled:

ENGAGEMENT METRIC: 8.7/10.0 GESTURE VARIETY: OPTIMAL RANGE VOCAL MODULATION: SUPERIOR QUALITY

“I am pleased to inform that subject demonstrates strong audience retention factor. Performance quality is superior.”

Jason sat on his bed, staring at the scores. The machine thought Megan was more compelling than he had ever been. It thought she was performing at a “superior” level. And Jason felt absolutely nothing watching her.

By March, he had run out of things to talk about with Megan. They still held hands, but to him it felt like obligation. She was pretty. Her mouth tasted sweet and her softness felt good against him. She was everything he’d thought he wanted, but it wasn’t enough.

Soon after, Lenora moved to San Francisco, for a job serving coffee at Skren headquarters. Jason tried to maintain connection through VidLink, recording messages about drama class and his hopes for college. He sent three cartridges. Two responses came back corrupted, mostly static and green distortion. He could tell Lenora’s hair was different, less platinum, more professional. His third message never got a response.

The Skren technology that promised connection delivered nothing but hissing static. Jason still had MiyoVox footage of conversations with Lenora from months earlier, back before he’d been performing for metrics, when things just seemed natural. Watching her smoke cigarettes and goof off in those recordings felt like unearthing an old documentary about a strange person he used to be.

The acceptance letter from Marlboro College in Vermont arrived on a Tuesday. Jason read it three times in his car before going inside.

At dinner—a rare event where all three Hartleys occupied the same room—he told his parents. They had removed their headsets for the meal, but both of them kept glancing toward their bedrooms like prisoners calculating escape routes.

“Vermont?” his mother said, cigarette smoke curling from her nostrils. “That’s across the whole damn country.”

“It’s a good school. They have a good program.”

“What program?” his father asked. Jason realized he couldn’t remember the last time his father asked him a direct question.

“Theater, writing, liberal arts, you know?”

His mother stubbed out her cigarette. “We’ve got plenty of liberal schools here, perfectly good ones.”

“But I want to go there.”

The two of them stared at each other across the table, until Jason saw something flicker in her eyes, not quite hurt, but close. His father just nodded meekly and went back to his spaghetti.

“What about money?” his mother asked finally.

“I have some saved. I got a scholarship. I can take out loans. I’ll work. I’ll figure it out.”

She lit up another cigarette. “I guess you’ll have to.”

Later that evening, after his parents had retreated to their immersion zones, Jason pulled the MiyoVox from his backpack and recorded the empty table, with its three abandoned place settings. The last cigarette in the ashtray still emitted a thin stream of smoke. The machine tried to analyze it:

SUBJECTS: ABSENT EMOTIONAL CONTENT ANALYSIS: INCONCLUSIVE. ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMIC PARAMETER: UNDEFINED

Jason broke up with Megan a week later. She cried, which made him feel both miserable and cruel at the same time. The breakup happened without documentation, without metrics. It was just two kids in a parking lot, and then one of them leaving.

He drove home with Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole” blasting from his speakers. Trent Reznor screamed about control and refusing to give it. Jason sang along, his voice raw and cracking. He wasn’t rejecting just Megan. He was rejecting everything that used to matter to him: the metrics, the optimization, the machine’s approval, David’s approval, his parents’ approval. All of it.

I’d rather die than give you control.

Lenora completely vanished into her new life in San Francisco. Mr. Carlson announced he was leaving to teach in Portland. Everything was ending, which meant something was beginning.

Late August arrived, and Jason felt the Oregon heat thick and heavy over everything. He loaded the last box into his Datsun, a rust-yellow 1978 B210 wagon that had 180,000 miles and probably few left to go. The backseat was crammed with clothes, books, a CD player he’d bought at Goodwill, and everything else he owned. It all fit in the car.

The night before, Jason had gone through his VHS–C cartridge collection, every recording. Hours of footage: his parents, Megan, himself. All performances.

He’d set up the MiyoVox one final time, recording without planning what to say.

“I was here,” he said to the camera. “I existed in this house. I performed for you, and it didn’t matter. I’m done performing.”

He left the cartridge on the kitchen table with a note: For Mom and Dad, if you ever want to watch.

Now, the MiyoVox sat in the passenger seat of the Datsun, but it was turned off. He wasn’t even sure why he was bringing it. Maybe just as a reminder, or proof to himself that he could carry it without using it.

His mother stood on the porch in her scrubs, ready to leave for her shift. She’d been crying earlier—Jason had heard her in her room—but her face was dry now, composed.

“Drive safe,” she said. “Call when you get there.”

“I will.”

“It’s a long way.”

“I know.”

She nodded, lit a cigarette, and went inside without hugging him. Jason told himself it was fine.

His father appeared in the doorway.

“You got enough money?”

“Yeah, Dad. I’m good.”

His father reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled envelope from the bank. “Take it anyway.”

Inside was two hundred dollars in tens and twenties. Jason felt a lump catch in his throat.

“Thanks.”

His father nodded and retreated back into the house, back into the silence of his room.

Jason sat in his car for a moment, engine running. He looked back at the house where he’d grown up: peeling paint, overgrown lawn, and closed curtains.

He put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb.

The highway stretched east, and Jason turned up the radio. Pixies played on the college station, Black Francis singing about losing his mind. Jason sang along, his voice cracking on the high notes, but he didn’t care if anyone heard.

Vermont was three thousand miles away. He’d never been there, and didn’t know anyone there. He had no idea what he’d find.

Somewhere in Idaho, the Datsun’s engine made a concerning noise. Jason kept driving. He reached over and shoved the MiyoVox onto the floor, where it slid under the passenger seat and disappeared from view.

The sun set behind him, painting the rearview mirror gold and crimson, but he didn’t look back. There was nothing behind him worth seeing.

The road hummed beneath him, and for the first time, Jason felt like he was bleeding instead of just performing.

He turned up the radio and drove into the dark.