How You Came to Leave (Part XV) - complete
Part I: An' Another Thing
Part II: Last to Know
Part III: Wicked Game
Part IV: Talking to the Moon
Part V: Look What You've Done
Part VI: Knife Going In
Part VII: I'm Not Calling You a Liar
Part VIII: Told You So
Part IX: I Gave You All
Part X: I Adore You
Part XI: Love Is No Big Truth
Part XII: Escape
Part XIII: No Longer What You Require
Part XIV: This Will All Make Perfect Sense Someday
Part XV: Our Love
Our love became our love by name when I wrote it to you in a song (Rhett Miller, Our Love)
The Renegade Who Came In From The Cold
Written by Alice Dalton
It doesn’t take me very long to realize there are two different Rachel Berry’s. There is the Rachel Berry who wrote the Broadway sensation How You Came to Leave (2018), which critics are already claiming is going to have an even bigger impact than Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked: The Musical (2003).
And then there is the Rachel Berry in front of me. She doesn’t quite look like the mastermind of the musical, but rather like any other 24-year-old getting a cup of coffee in Starbucks on an early Tuesday morning. She is just this side of shy, and although she engages in conversation and is answering my questions, it’s clear to me that she is also a very private person.
It seems a little bit of a contradiction, especially when How You Came to Leave comes across as being extremely personal. It would be impossible to pretend there isn’t a little bit of an autobiographical tale behind it, even if Berry at first refuses to disclose just what happened in her past to influence such a tragic tale.
It’s a complex musical, partly because it’s told through the point of view of an absent narrator, and partly because the scenes are acted out of sequence. It’s confusing, but adds an element of intrigue that makes the show stand out from the traditional mold of musicals, both on Broadway and on other stages.
A large part of the musical seems to take place inside the absent narrator’s head, something that Berry claims was actually unintentional when she began writing the musical after she graduated from McKinley High School in 2012 - with honors, she is quick to add.
It’s that strive for perfection, which blends so well with Berry’s ambition, that makes the storytelling so compelling. Unlike most tragedies, How You Came to Leave begins at the very end, when the main character, played by Laura Bell Bundy, walks away from her friends and costar Sutton Foster. The musical runs full circle and it’s only at the end that the fragmented memories begin to make sense. It’s a stroke of genius, and sitting down with Berry, I attempt to uncover the mystery of Broadway’s prodigal child.
“There’s a reason How You Came to Leave is written out of sequence,” Berry starts. “A part of it was when I was trying to tell the tale, I wasn’t quite sure where to begin - a lot of time in dramas, in tragedies, there really isn’t a starting point because each act is actually a trigger from what happened before.”
“The second part,” Berry continues, “is that a lot of the time I think as individuals we don’t tend to remember things in the sequence they actually happened - we remember things out of order. You might be walking down the street, for instance, and you see a gardenia - which reminds you of your junior Prom but it’s not the prom itself you remember, but the day before, when you were talking about the corsage. So the recollection happens out of order in our mind, why should we pretend as a narrator that things work out differently? The mind is so complex, let’s not simplify that. It takes away the mystery, really.”
Ah yes, the mystery - or in How You Came to Leave, the actual narrator.
It’s interesting talking to Berry about this absent narrator, who plays such a trivial part in the musical and yet is a character as an audience we know so little about. Some of that is deliberate - “it’s the story that’s important, not who tells it,” says Berry, but digging a little deeper, this character actually plays a much more important role than simply setting up a scene.
It’s this absent narrator who weaves the past and the present together, and who is responsible for each of the flashbacks scenes in the musical. Or so we like to think. Berry sees it differently.
“Look at it more closely,” she encourages. “How many of these flashbacks are triggered by the narrator? None of the scenes are with the narrator alone, which begs the question, how much of our absent narrator is telling us is real; how much is it what other characters assume the narrator remembers?”
It’s a good question, and sums up in part the intrigue of How You Came to Leave. How much of our memories are really what we remember, and how much of it is simply what other people think we remember? Memories are created by circumstance, something that is essential to the musical. The only monologues are that of the narrator.
When asked about who exactly the absent narrator is based on, Berry hesitates a little.
“It’s not me,” she says with a sad smile, leading us to believe it’s someone else close to her, but she doesn’t immediately elaborate further.
It’s at this moment that I realize it’s Rachel Berry, the 24-year-old girl sitting opposite me. She plays the role of the writer because it represents a sense of security but there’s something behind it; that desperation for approval that all of her characters are victim to, that suggests Rachel Berry, the girl, is actually the one with the story to tell.
“How You Came to Leave is tragic, and I know that,” she says. “It’s basically the story of what it’s like to fall in love with someone who leaves you behind, but there’s always a part of you that’s expecting them to come back - so you keep replaying the good memories to convince yourself there’s something to come back to. You know, like the good memories must at some point in time outweigh the bad.”
So what were these bad memories?
It takes Berry a while to answer, and she looks so intently at her cup of coffee that I can’t help but glance into mine as well, wondering if that will somehow give me an insight into the mind of Broadway’s prodigal child.
“Her name was Quinn,” Berry sighs, “and she was the prettiest girl I’ve ever met, but it took her almost three years to actually believe that she could be more than just her looks. It was a little bit her fatal flaw, in some ways. She needed to know she mattered to someone but she rejected anyone who was focused on her looks - like a narcissist who is both in love with himself but also with a renegade. Or maybe she was more the other way around, maybe she was the renegade who was both in love with a cause and a narcissist.”
Like Oscar Wilde’s Caliban, I offer, and Berry smiles and shakes her head.
“Not quite,” she disagrees. “Wilde portrayed Caliban as wanting to see his own reflection and then hating it when he did. Quinn just - needed to believe in herself again, because her faith - she used to be quite devoted to God, before … things happened - was shaken and she just had to reconstruct it, a little bit at a time.”
So she believed in you, I prompt, and again, Berry looks to her coffee for answers.
“If only it was that simple.”
That touch of self-reproach, which at times borders on self-loathing in the musical, is actually what makes all of Berry’s characters so interesting.
It’s a refreshing change, watching a musical - or any show in general - where not only are the characters not perfect, but at no time do they claim to be. They’re not supposed to be role models; they’re genuine human beings who have real flaws. At times, the flaws of Berry’s characters are amplified, but maybe that’s the point. Rachel Berry is brutally honest in How You Came to Leave as she confesses she isn’t perfect, and we shouldn’t expect her characters to be something they’re not.
I try to bring her back to the subject of Quinn and belief, because it’s a recurring theme in How You Came to Leave.
“She believed in the principle of making a difference and no one can really blame her for that,” Berry says. “It was difficult for her because she went from being someone who had it all and then had nothing - except for maybe the scars, to remind her.”
Even in this Starbucks, Berry tells the story of Quinn so eloquently it’s easy to understand how this elusive stranger ended up playing such a key part in the creation of the musical. There is a softness to Berry that simply shines through when she talks about Quinn, be it her quirks - despite being left-footed, she favored her right because she injured her ankle during cheerleading practice as a teenager - to that final decision that night in October.
“The musical is set in high school,” Berry says, “so you have this group of teenagers - kids, really, the lot of them - and they’re trying to figure what they want in life, who they really are, and all of that. High school is all about trying to figure out your own identity, even if university students will argue you only understand your identity when you get to college.”
“In How You Came to Leave, you have these two lovers who have different beliefs but at some points, they start to intertwine. They started believing in each other, but it’s a gradual development, and it is fragile at best.”
Berry hesitates again, and the sadness of her face is suddenly overwhelming. Whatever memories she is replaying in her head, she isn’t sharing.
“They believed in each other,” Berry repeats. “And then - then there was Berkeley, who came along with all these promises of rebuilding and believing and making a difference and you can’t fault anyone for wanting that.”
But you do, I point out. To an extent, you must blame the university for how your senior year of high school had ended.
“I blamed a lot of people, including Berkeley, including myself,” Berry defends herself. “Did I blame the scout for making Quinn finally believe in herself, enough to reach for something? No, I didn’t. I still don’t.”
It’s interesting how fired up Berry gets over this - it’s a fiery passion that hints there is a very, very fine line I’m walking. But there are answers to be had, so I push a little bit more. What really happened that day?
“Berkeley got Quinn to believe in herself,” Berry repeats, and the fire is gone, replaced now by undeniable sadness. “But there was a compromise, and it took a while for me to accept it. By getting Quinn to believe in herself, she was forfeiting her belief in me. It sounds petty, saying it out loud, but that’s what it felt like - like she chose to believe in Berkeley more than she believed in me, and I - I struggled to come to terms with that.”
We shouldn’t be too hard on Rachel Berry for having felt like that, since the end product was How You Came to Leave. Berry says that writing the musical started off simply as a coping mechanism for a broken heart; later though, the words simply weren’t enough, and she started to put music to them. It came as a shock, she tells me, when she discovered that music hadn’t left with Quinn.
We get into an interesting discussion about the role Julliard played in her life. Berry starts off by saying she holds Julliard in the highest esteem, but something about her smile when she says it suggests the claim might not be as sincere as she would like us to believe it is. (e.d. - Berry had originally been accepted to Julliard as a freshman in 2012 but turned it down for personal reasons)
“It took about four years of soul searching and writing lyrics for me to understand that despite everything, I still wanted to go to Julliard,” Berry confesses. “But I still wasn’t sure how I wanted to fit into it, considering that they don’t have musical theatre, so I had to find something.”
Berry talks about the audition for Julliard the same manner the absent narrator sets up a scene in How You Came to Leave, and suddenly the two most heartbreaking scenes make sense. Berry’s desperation to make up to Julliard for originally turning them down is echoed when Bundy is in the Church, confessing that she simply made the mistake of not having loved Foster enough when she had the chance; the courtroom scene where Bundy is pleading guilty to breaking Foster’s heart is simply an echo of Berry’s own audition.
Berry is quick to assure me it didn’t actually take place in an abandoned courtroom but that “it certainly felt like it”.
“You’re in this massive room,” she describes, “and it’s just you and these admission officers, and you feel like you’re on trial, you know? You’re on the witness stand and they are the prosecution, and it’s all very, very intimidating. And when you finished your audition and they’re just talking amongst themselves, it feels very akin to waiting for a verdict to be delivered. Which in some ways, you know, you kind of are.”
There’s a trace of isolation in the way that Berry talks about Julliard, and for a moment, I’m not sure which girl I’m talking to - Broadway’s prodigal child, or the 24-year-old girl. Julliard is quick to claim credit for having nurtured a large part of Berry’s talent, but how much of How You Came to Leave can Julliard really claim as theirs, particularly as there was the better part of four years between Berry’s first and second auditions.
“Yes, well,” she sighs, “they definitely played a part in it, because it was when I was at Julliard that I was taking a class in their playwright program (e.d. Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwright Program). They saw the draft for How You Came to Leave and I guess they saw the potential it had.”
The mood is becoming a little too somber for this early on a Tuesday morning in Starbucks, so instead, I start asking Berry about her actual leads. How did she manage to get such a talented cast on board, considering this is her first Broadway musical?
“Narcissism,” Berry deadpans. “No, actually, I just asked.”
You asked the likes of Sutton Foster and Laura Bell Bundy to appear in your musical?
Apparently, some things are that simple for Broadway’s new favorite renegade. It’s understandable how Foster and Bundy could have been so easily persuaded to be a part of it because there is something special about it.
Berry continues to tell me about the meetings with Foster and Bundy, how one of the questions she had asked them was whether they had ever had something they loved more than anything taken away from them.
“How You Came to Leave is about loss,” Berry says. “And I just wanted whoever would play the parts in the musical to have really felt that. We’ve all had our hearts broken at some point in our lives, you know? But the question is how convincing you can make it. Anyone can tell you how it feels to have your heart broken, but I wanted someone who could make the audience feel as if it was their hearts being broken. I wanted to keep that fourth wall, but break it at the same time, and I needed the right cast to do that.”
There it is, that famous word which describes the audience’s reaction so well after seeing How You Came to Leave - heartbreak. It is heartbreaking because as the story unravels, we begin to understand that really, the musical is about a love story that was doomed from the beginning. At first we want to believe Bundy’s character really is the villain - how dare she leave everyone behind! How dare she give in to the Ivy school’s ultimatum!
But as the story progresses, we understand the lines were blurred from the beginning. The ultimatum was always there and so watching Bundy’s character fall even more in love with Foster is heartbreaking but what is worse is we know how the story ends - with Bundy walking away.
Foster, for her part, plays her role perfectly. We see traces of Berry’s own ambition in her but beyond that there is a vulnerability that is completely heartbreaking - we know why Bundy is slowly shutting her out of her life, but Foster’s character does not. Watching the musical, we want to cry out to Foster, explain what is happening, but instead we are simply bound to the absent narrator, and hope that this character is the one who will explain what happened.
By the time the final curtain closes, there are some questions left. We never really know, though, and that’s part of the intrigue. Most of the play’s questions get answered in the final act - and how heartbreaking is it when we learn the words that got Bundy’s character to leave was actually a play on Foster’s own speech? - yet there are still some parts of the equation that have to be solved.
“I don’t think anyone has all of the answers,” Berry tells me. “I think it’s about wanting to find the answers but sometimes we don’t always have them, so the musical is a little bit of trying to make sense with what we do have. In some ways, I want the audience to fill in the blanks for themselves, you know? I want them to wonder what would they have done in that situation, how would they have reacted, etc. It’s their musical, too, just as much as it is mine.”
It’s part of what draws the audience so effectively into How You Came to Leave. Interesting in particular in light of how private Berry is about her personal life, and yet the raw intimacy of the play makes us feel that Berry is not only talking to us, but also about us. She draws us into this magical world where past memories and present heartbreaks become one and the same.
But right before Berry gets up to leave, I have one final question for her. What happened to her relationship with Quinn?
Berry hesitates before answering. “She left,” she says, very quietly.
Did she come back? I press. Berry turns to look out the Starbucks window.
“That’s the thing about renegades,” she tells me. “Sometimes they come back, after all. Nobody ever tells you that, but sometimes, they do come back.”
How You Came to Leave is currently playing at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in New York City. Call 1-800-BROADWAY or go online at http://ppc.broadway.com for more ticket information.
Not Stealing If You Acknowledge It:
- Title of the chapter is taken from the song "Our Love" by Rhett Miller
- I don't own Glee nor am I affiliated with it in any shape or form
- I know TMF opened "A Thousand Julys" in a similar fashion, and I just want to state for the record that I had emailed my beta about ending HYCTL with an article on September 29, and TMF posted "A Thousand Julys" on October 9. So I didn't steal the idea at all, she honestly just posted it before I did.
- Special thanks to Erika who played along with plot discussion
- "Alice Dalton" is the cumulative name of two professors I had who influenced me. Socrates would be happy to know the youth can still be corrupted.
- Lauren Bell Bundy was chosen simply because I googled "blonde Broadway singer" and her name came up; Sutton Foster was the result of "broadway singer".
- 1-800-BROADWAY and the website, as well as the name of the theatre, are all legitimate.
Part II: Last to Know
Part III: Wicked Game
Part IV: Talking to the Moon
Part V: Look What You've Done
Part VI: Knife Going In
Part VII: I'm Not Calling You a Liar
Part VIII: Told You So
Part IX: I Gave You All
Part X: I Adore You
Part XI: Love Is No Big Truth
Part XII: Escape
Part XIII: No Longer What You Require
Part XIV: This Will All Make Perfect Sense Someday
Part XV: Our Love
Our love became our love by name when I wrote it to you in a song (Rhett Miller, Our Love)
The Renegade Who Came In From The Cold
Written by Alice Dalton
It doesn’t take me very long to realize there are two different Rachel Berry’s. There is the Rachel Berry who wrote the Broadway sensation How You Came to Leave (2018), which critics are already claiming is going to have an even bigger impact than Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked: The Musical (2003).
And then there is the Rachel Berry in front of me. She doesn’t quite look like the mastermind of the musical, but rather like any other 24-year-old getting a cup of coffee in Starbucks on an early Tuesday morning. She is just this side of shy, and although she engages in conversation and is answering my questions, it’s clear to me that she is also a very private person.
It seems a little bit of a contradiction, especially when How You Came to Leave comes across as being extremely personal. It would be impossible to pretend there isn’t a little bit of an autobiographical tale behind it, even if Berry at first refuses to disclose just what happened in her past to influence such a tragic tale.
It’s a complex musical, partly because it’s told through the point of view of an absent narrator, and partly because the scenes are acted out of sequence. It’s confusing, but adds an element of intrigue that makes the show stand out from the traditional mold of musicals, both on Broadway and on other stages.
A large part of the musical seems to take place inside the absent narrator’s head, something that Berry claims was actually unintentional when she began writing the musical after she graduated from McKinley High School in 2012 - with honors, she is quick to add.
It’s that strive for perfection, which blends so well with Berry’s ambition, that makes the storytelling so compelling. Unlike most tragedies, How You Came to Leave begins at the very end, when the main character, played by Laura Bell Bundy, walks away from her friends and costar Sutton Foster. The musical runs full circle and it’s only at the end that the fragmented memories begin to make sense. It’s a stroke of genius, and sitting down with Berry, I attempt to uncover the mystery of Broadway’s prodigal child.
“There’s a reason How You Came to Leave is written out of sequence,” Berry starts. “A part of it was when I was trying to tell the tale, I wasn’t quite sure where to begin - a lot of time in dramas, in tragedies, there really isn’t a starting point because each act is actually a trigger from what happened before.”
“The second part,” Berry continues, “is that a lot of the time I think as individuals we don’t tend to remember things in the sequence they actually happened - we remember things out of order. You might be walking down the street, for instance, and you see a gardenia - which reminds you of your junior Prom but it’s not the prom itself you remember, but the day before, when you were talking about the corsage. So the recollection happens out of order in our mind, why should we pretend as a narrator that things work out differently? The mind is so complex, let’s not simplify that. It takes away the mystery, really.”
Ah yes, the mystery - or in How You Came to Leave, the actual narrator.
It’s interesting talking to Berry about this absent narrator, who plays such a trivial part in the musical and yet is a character as an audience we know so little about. Some of that is deliberate - “it’s the story that’s important, not who tells it,” says Berry, but digging a little deeper, this character actually plays a much more important role than simply setting up a scene.
It’s this absent narrator who weaves the past and the present together, and who is responsible for each of the flashbacks scenes in the musical. Or so we like to think. Berry sees it differently.
“Look at it more closely,” she encourages. “How many of these flashbacks are triggered by the narrator? None of the scenes are with the narrator alone, which begs the question, how much of our absent narrator is telling us is real; how much is it what other characters assume the narrator remembers?”
It’s a good question, and sums up in part the intrigue of How You Came to Leave. How much of our memories are really what we remember, and how much of it is simply what other people think we remember? Memories are created by circumstance, something that is essential to the musical. The only monologues are that of the narrator.
When asked about who exactly the absent narrator is based on, Berry hesitates a little.
“It’s not me,” she says with a sad smile, leading us to believe it’s someone else close to her, but she doesn’t immediately elaborate further.
It’s at this moment that I realize it’s Rachel Berry, the 24-year-old girl sitting opposite me. She plays the role of the writer because it represents a sense of security but there’s something behind it; that desperation for approval that all of her characters are victim to, that suggests Rachel Berry, the girl, is actually the one with the story to tell.
“How You Came to Leave is tragic, and I know that,” she says. “It’s basically the story of what it’s like to fall in love with someone who leaves you behind, but there’s always a part of you that’s expecting them to come back - so you keep replaying the good memories to convince yourself there’s something to come back to. You know, like the good memories must at some point in time outweigh the bad.”
So what were these bad memories?
It takes Berry a while to answer, and she looks so intently at her cup of coffee that I can’t help but glance into mine as well, wondering if that will somehow give me an insight into the mind of Broadway’s prodigal child.
“Her name was Quinn,” Berry sighs, “and she was the prettiest girl I’ve ever met, but it took her almost three years to actually believe that she could be more than just her looks. It was a little bit her fatal flaw, in some ways. She needed to know she mattered to someone but she rejected anyone who was focused on her looks - like a narcissist who is both in love with himself but also with a renegade. Or maybe she was more the other way around, maybe she was the renegade who was both in love with a cause and a narcissist.”
Like Oscar Wilde’s Caliban, I offer, and Berry smiles and shakes her head.
“Not quite,” she disagrees. “Wilde portrayed Caliban as wanting to see his own reflection and then hating it when he did. Quinn just - needed to believe in herself again, because her faith - she used to be quite devoted to God, before … things happened - was shaken and she just had to reconstruct it, a little bit at a time.”
So she believed in you, I prompt, and again, Berry looks to her coffee for answers.
“If only it was that simple.”
That touch of self-reproach, which at times borders on self-loathing in the musical, is actually what makes all of Berry’s characters so interesting.
It’s a refreshing change, watching a musical - or any show in general - where not only are the characters not perfect, but at no time do they claim to be. They’re not supposed to be role models; they’re genuine human beings who have real flaws. At times, the flaws of Berry’s characters are amplified, but maybe that’s the point. Rachel Berry is brutally honest in How You Came to Leave as she confesses she isn’t perfect, and we shouldn’t expect her characters to be something they’re not.
I try to bring her back to the subject of Quinn and belief, because it’s a recurring theme in How You Came to Leave.
“She believed in the principle of making a difference and no one can really blame her for that,” Berry says. “It was difficult for her because she went from being someone who had it all and then had nothing - except for maybe the scars, to remind her.”
Even in this Starbucks, Berry tells the story of Quinn so eloquently it’s easy to understand how this elusive stranger ended up playing such a key part in the creation of the musical. There is a softness to Berry that simply shines through when she talks about Quinn, be it her quirks - despite being left-footed, she favored her right because she injured her ankle during cheerleading practice as a teenager - to that final decision that night in October.
“The musical is set in high school,” Berry says, “so you have this group of teenagers - kids, really, the lot of them - and they’re trying to figure what they want in life, who they really are, and all of that. High school is all about trying to figure out your own identity, even if university students will argue you only understand your identity when you get to college.”
“In How You Came to Leave, you have these two lovers who have different beliefs but at some points, they start to intertwine. They started believing in each other, but it’s a gradual development, and it is fragile at best.”
Berry hesitates again, and the sadness of her face is suddenly overwhelming. Whatever memories she is replaying in her head, she isn’t sharing.
“They believed in each other,” Berry repeats. “And then - then there was Berkeley, who came along with all these promises of rebuilding and believing and making a difference and you can’t fault anyone for wanting that.”
But you do, I point out. To an extent, you must blame the university for how your senior year of high school had ended.
“I blamed a lot of people, including Berkeley, including myself,” Berry defends herself. “Did I blame the scout for making Quinn finally believe in herself, enough to reach for something? No, I didn’t. I still don’t.”
It’s interesting how fired up Berry gets over this - it’s a fiery passion that hints there is a very, very fine line I’m walking. But there are answers to be had, so I push a little bit more. What really happened that day?
“Berkeley got Quinn to believe in herself,” Berry repeats, and the fire is gone, replaced now by undeniable sadness. “But there was a compromise, and it took a while for me to accept it. By getting Quinn to believe in herself, she was forfeiting her belief in me. It sounds petty, saying it out loud, but that’s what it felt like - like she chose to believe in Berkeley more than she believed in me, and I - I struggled to come to terms with that.”
We shouldn’t be too hard on Rachel Berry for having felt like that, since the end product was How You Came to Leave. Berry says that writing the musical started off simply as a coping mechanism for a broken heart; later though, the words simply weren’t enough, and she started to put music to them. It came as a shock, she tells me, when she discovered that music hadn’t left with Quinn.
We get into an interesting discussion about the role Julliard played in her life. Berry starts off by saying she holds Julliard in the highest esteem, but something about her smile when she says it suggests the claim might not be as sincere as she would like us to believe it is. (e.d. - Berry had originally been accepted to Julliard as a freshman in 2012 but turned it down for personal reasons)
“It took about four years of soul searching and writing lyrics for me to understand that despite everything, I still wanted to go to Julliard,” Berry confesses. “But I still wasn’t sure how I wanted to fit into it, considering that they don’t have musical theatre, so I had to find something.”
Berry talks about the audition for Julliard the same manner the absent narrator sets up a scene in How You Came to Leave, and suddenly the two most heartbreaking scenes make sense. Berry’s desperation to make up to Julliard for originally turning them down is echoed when Bundy is in the Church, confessing that she simply made the mistake of not having loved Foster enough when she had the chance; the courtroom scene where Bundy is pleading guilty to breaking Foster’s heart is simply an echo of Berry’s own audition.
Berry is quick to assure me it didn’t actually take place in an abandoned courtroom but that “it certainly felt like it”.
“You’re in this massive room,” she describes, “and it’s just you and these admission officers, and you feel like you’re on trial, you know? You’re on the witness stand and they are the prosecution, and it’s all very, very intimidating. And when you finished your audition and they’re just talking amongst themselves, it feels very akin to waiting for a verdict to be delivered. Which in some ways, you know, you kind of are.”
There’s a trace of isolation in the way that Berry talks about Julliard, and for a moment, I’m not sure which girl I’m talking to - Broadway’s prodigal child, or the 24-year-old girl. Julliard is quick to claim credit for having nurtured a large part of Berry’s talent, but how much of How You Came to Leave can Julliard really claim as theirs, particularly as there was the better part of four years between Berry’s first and second auditions.
“Yes, well,” she sighs, “they definitely played a part in it, because it was when I was at Julliard that I was taking a class in their playwright program (e.d. Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwright Program). They saw the draft for How You Came to Leave and I guess they saw the potential it had.”
The mood is becoming a little too somber for this early on a Tuesday morning in Starbucks, so instead, I start asking Berry about her actual leads. How did she manage to get such a talented cast on board, considering this is her first Broadway musical?
“Narcissism,” Berry deadpans. “No, actually, I just asked.”
You asked the likes of Sutton Foster and Laura Bell Bundy to appear in your musical?
Apparently, some things are that simple for Broadway’s new favorite renegade. It’s understandable how Foster and Bundy could have been so easily persuaded to be a part of it because there is something special about it.
Berry continues to tell me about the meetings with Foster and Bundy, how one of the questions she had asked them was whether they had ever had something they loved more than anything taken away from them.
“How You Came to Leave is about loss,” Berry says. “And I just wanted whoever would play the parts in the musical to have really felt that. We’ve all had our hearts broken at some point in our lives, you know? But the question is how convincing you can make it. Anyone can tell you how it feels to have your heart broken, but I wanted someone who could make the audience feel as if it was their hearts being broken. I wanted to keep that fourth wall, but break it at the same time, and I needed the right cast to do that.”
There it is, that famous word which describes the audience’s reaction so well after seeing How You Came to Leave - heartbreak. It is heartbreaking because as the story unravels, we begin to understand that really, the musical is about a love story that was doomed from the beginning. At first we want to believe Bundy’s character really is the villain - how dare she leave everyone behind! How dare she give in to the Ivy school’s ultimatum!
But as the story progresses, we understand the lines were blurred from the beginning. The ultimatum was always there and so watching Bundy’s character fall even more in love with Foster is heartbreaking but what is worse is we know how the story ends - with Bundy walking away.
Foster, for her part, plays her role perfectly. We see traces of Berry’s own ambition in her but beyond that there is a vulnerability that is completely heartbreaking - we know why Bundy is slowly shutting her out of her life, but Foster’s character does not. Watching the musical, we want to cry out to Foster, explain what is happening, but instead we are simply bound to the absent narrator, and hope that this character is the one who will explain what happened.
By the time the final curtain closes, there are some questions left. We never really know, though, and that’s part of the intrigue. Most of the play’s questions get answered in the final act - and how heartbreaking is it when we learn the words that got Bundy’s character to leave was actually a play on Foster’s own speech? - yet there are still some parts of the equation that have to be solved.
“I don’t think anyone has all of the answers,” Berry tells me. “I think it’s about wanting to find the answers but sometimes we don’t always have them, so the musical is a little bit of trying to make sense with what we do have. In some ways, I want the audience to fill in the blanks for themselves, you know? I want them to wonder what would they have done in that situation, how would they have reacted, etc. It’s their musical, too, just as much as it is mine.”
It’s part of what draws the audience so effectively into How You Came to Leave. Interesting in particular in light of how private Berry is about her personal life, and yet the raw intimacy of the play makes us feel that Berry is not only talking to us, but also about us. She draws us into this magical world where past memories and present heartbreaks become one and the same.
But right before Berry gets up to leave, I have one final question for her. What happened to her relationship with Quinn?
Berry hesitates before answering. “She left,” she says, very quietly.
Did she come back? I press. Berry turns to look out the Starbucks window.
“That’s the thing about renegades,” she tells me. “Sometimes they come back, after all. Nobody ever tells you that, but sometimes, they do come back.”
How You Came to Leave is currently playing at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in New York City. Call 1-800-BROADWAY or go online at http://ppc.broadway.com for more ticket information.
Not Stealing If You Acknowledge It:
- Title of the chapter is taken from the song "Our Love" by Rhett Miller
- I don't own Glee nor am I affiliated with it in any shape or form
- I know TMF opened "A Thousand Julys" in a similar fashion, and I just want to state for the record that I had emailed my beta about ending HYCTL with an article on September 29, and TMF posted "A Thousand Julys" on October 9. So I didn't steal the idea at all, she honestly just posted it before I did.
- Special thanks to Erika who played along with plot discussion
- "Alice Dalton" is the cumulative name of two professors I had who influenced me. Socrates would be happy to know the youth can still be corrupted.
- Lauren Bell Bundy was chosen simply because I googled "blonde Broadway singer" and her name came up; Sutton Foster was the result of "broadway singer".
- 1-800-BROADWAY and the website, as well as the name of the theatre, are all legitimate.