Director's Note

I moved to Texas a little under a decade ago, but I was born and raised in Orlando. You’re rarely more than two hours from a beach in Florida, and my happy place growing up, my favorite beach, was always teeming with life; snorkeling next to tiny fish in every seaweed bundle, making sandcastles and carefully tossing every periwinkle or sandflea I found back to the ocean, and chasing down crabs with a flashlight only release the bucketful at the end of the night are some of my fondest memories. My beach changed forever when it was devastated by the oil spill in 2010. The reefs I grew up with weren’t perfect before then, but it wasn’t until after the spill that every mural on the youth center of my church, every campy gift shop, every tacky painting on someone’s beach-themed bathroom felt like a broken promise of a beautiful, colorful world that was taken from me. Ghosts of what were once some of the largest living structures on the planet haunted former feats of nature, and it was the first time it really hit me that my generation was inheriting a dying world.

The second time I felt this kind of communal devastation was in 2016. Growing up conservative in the south, I didn’t feel I could be ‘out’ until I was legally an adult, but theatre let me explore parts of my identity I couldn’t at home. I made friends and found mentors in brave queer adults who told me, “it gets better.” There came a time as a teenager when I remember overhearing whispers from the cool queer adults about a safe, beautiful, colorful place where much of Orlando’s local queer community went to hang: a nightclub called Pulse. Closeted kids like me couldn’t wait to be old enough to see it; the lights, the fashion, the dancing, the people… even my introverted self couldn’t wait for the experience, like it was some rite of passage you get to do when you’re finally eighteen and old enough to go and be out and proud somewhere just for us.

When I was seventeen, than fifteen minutes away from my home, the place I dreamed about became the site of the deadliest mass shooting in US history at that point. It felt like one person’s night of hate smothered a legacy of love held by an entire community. Like the oil that seeped into my favorite beach a few years prior, something vile and selfish had desecrated a safe haven before it could ever be mine; Pulse was the colorful reef that I never got to see like it was meant to be, ripped away when it was almost within reach. For a minute I felt like Weeks and Tuesday, mourning the bones left behind of a community I believed I would never be a part of.

But I was wrong.

Although I would never get to experience the Pulse Nightclub, I did get to experience the Pulse Memorial. Community didn’t find me through pure party culture or fun, but through loss; my city grieved people I thought it hated, allies I didn’t know I had stood arm in arm as a an army of angels to protect mourners from hate groups, and my community came together to support each other in ways I never thought possible. It was the first time I felt like I understood calling a funeral a “celebration of life.” The outpouring of love grew and grew into a resistance filled with joy; after the one of the most gut-wrenching, soul-crushing events I could imagine, I got to experience a love that conquered hate as my community found hope in each other.

Fun fact about coral bleaching: it can be reversed. When coral bleaches, it expels zooxanthellae, a symbiotic algae that they rely on for most of their food and oxygen, often killing the coral in the longterm. But what many people don’t know is that if stressors are eliminated quickly enough, they can come back; it takes time, years even, but there’s still hope because it’s still alive. Some scientists say the biggest obstacle to save coral reefs isn’t the bleaching itself, but getting people not to give up on the reefs while there’s still hope.

Central to this script is the fact that, even in an existence threaded with loss and uncertainty, Tuesday and Weeks continue. Together. Solutions aren’t found in isolation. By definition, we can’t evolve alone; evolution happens in community. Like the coral on the Great Barrier Reef has persisted over millennia by adapting, building a community of interdependent organisms, this story is about the resilience we find in each other – about nurturing that hope even in the face of hopelessness. There's grief in this story, but there’s also humor, forgiveness, yearning for intimacy, and power in vulnerability. In spite of what feels like The End, people have the audacity to hope.

In my opinion, this is especially relevant to us as queer folks – even more so as trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming individuals in our current climate. Our queer canon of history is built on truths hidden between the lies of texts largely written by those who hate us, in the salvaged pieces of us that they didn’t burn on the pyre. Our legacy is a miracle of resistance, of survival, of overcoming impossible loss, and of defiance. Our legacy gives us the ability to endure, to persist recklessly, and to love one another radically, even in the face of erasure.

The End of the World is one kind of fear. Letting yourself open up again is another. And losing the only person you have left might be more terrifying than the apocalypse… but these characters try anyway – and that trying is everything. When the world is burning, we still reach for one another. We find laughter in the face of adversity; we resist with joy. Maybe loving someone you know you you’ll lose is a fool’s errand. But it is also one of the most brilliant, audacious, and important things a person can do.

What can two people do when facing what feels like the inevitable doom of the end?

We find each other.

We take care of each other.

We make hats for each other.

We invite people in.

And we keep the porchlight on.