Friendship & Love, That is Everything

A new play by young playwright Tommy Vines is a reminder to savor connections

“Friendship and love, that is everything. Being a good man in a storm, that is everything. Kindness, generosity, forgiveness…love is everything.”

These are the words Tommy Vines repeats in her new play, i love you and i always will or charlie’s play, an homage or “memorial play” to her friend Charlie, who died two years ago at age 19 of terminal brain cancer.

The grief Tommy endures watching her young friend from diagnosis through slow deterioration, to their death is the subject of this gripping two-hour series of monologues, movement and even a foray into the American Sign Language that Charlie—hard of hearing—learned and used throughout their brief life.

“What if I could say something only to you in this moment, Charlie?” Tommy says before launching into the beautiful motions of mourning her dear friend with her expressive hands.

When I went to see the play last Friday during the first performance of its three-day NYC run July 26-28 at The Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater at the West Side Y, I knew nothing about it except that my husband and I had supported the staging of the play written by and starring Tommy, his cousin Mary’s daughter. Tommy is the 2024 valedictorian of Boston University’s Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Theater, a wunderkind/ingenue we have watched over the years with awe, and we were eager to see her play staged.

From the opening, there is an intense physical element at work, a highly emotive gyration of bodies as Tommy (the play’s Movement Director) moves along with castmates Emma Weller, Jojo Charles and Alan Kuang, who all play “Fragments” in the story, narrated by Tommy.

The poetry and prose, coupled with the expressive movements of the four, offer up nothing short of anguish personified.

Tommy and her castmates studied movement under Yo-el Casselle at BU.

“Yo-el’s philosophy is about externalizing your internal life, making it so physical, so visceral,” Tommy told me as we chatted about the play days later in my kitchen.

“What I’ve learned really scares people is seeing others taking off their social mask. Because I have unmasked myself, showing you something inside of me that is totally authentic, that can be really disturbing.”

Tommy takes us through memories of when her friend is there by her side, smoking, dancing, hugging, singing; as they are diagnosed with cancer; as they are dying; and, then, as they die. It is excruciating to imagine these two as children, teenagers, barely aware of what it is to be alive, and then to fathom that one of them, Charlie, is just gone.

It is hard to watch, this authenticity, disturbing indeed, and at the end, I don’t. I close my eyes against the searing physicality of Tommy’s loneliness, the emptiness of such a great loss, at such a young age. I can remember the feeling when a beloved person goes away, is no longer a daily part of life. I can remember friendship’s end, through death or other less tragic circumstances. It can feel hard to allow yourself that closeness again for fear of such an ugly bitter end. One wonders if they ever experience such naïve pure friendships after such a loss.

Tommy tries to recall if she was in fact a good enough friend. She remembers guiltily all the times she begged off, was inattentive, the times she didn’t pay attention to her friend to finish homework, to focus on things that now seem relatively unimportant, when she could have had more time with her friend.

What’s really important is an important theme in the play. Tommy speaks about the aftermath of Charlie’s death, when she began to gather up all the writings she’d done for them and about them, as a “powerful 6-8 months where I thought: I KNOW WHAT MATTERS…”

Faith is also a big theme. Charlie was a devout Christian, and Tommy explores her own feelings about religion that her friend’s faith raised up in her, as well as classic questions of reconciling Belief and tragedy.

“Thanks be to God, Thanks be to God, thanks God…” Tommy says at one point in the play, questioningly, sardonically, pondering in this poetic way how this God-loving person could have been taken away so early.

To believe, to understand…The playwright and the mourned missing protagonist are so young, so naïve and yet so wise beyond their years because of the harsh break-in of the grotesque reality of death.

“And I read existentialism,” Tommy says in the play, “and I don’t understand it anymore, and it breaks my heart, because you break my heart.”

I smile wanly at this line, in recognition of the lifetime dance with denial that we’re alone, really and truly alone, that we are each responsible for creating meaning and purpose in our own lives, that the existence of others is somehow tangential, actually maybe unnecessary.

It can seem in those moments when in the company of someone who shines a bright light upon us, who sees the world the way we do, or in an even better way that we are then willing to see, that it is truly impossible to live happily without them.

But maybe such a notion is immature, I found myself thinking as I watched Tommy, listened to her on stage. Maybe we grow out of it, out of necessity, out of a sense of protection: our hearts can only handle so much loss, so maybe we inure ourselves to it, maybe we don’t even seek it out in the same way we once did, like playful puppies, when we were unconscious of the inevitable end of such joyous bonding.

Sitting in the play I am reminded of how painful it is to lose a friend, and how that pain is a reminder to find joy in oneself. But I am also reminded to call my friends, to seek them out, to find new ones. It is a reminder that the pleasure of relating with other people is paramount, and that we must place it as an utmost priority, above almost anything, above almost everything.

Tommy’s homage to Charlie is an incredibly heart-wrenching love letter to the power and necessity of connection, despite the pain of it. Maybe in some ways it is a call to really feel into that pain, to feel at all, to live, for as long as we have.

Thank you Tommy Vines for your efforts on our behalf, and on Charlie’s. Donations can be made to Pinecrest Lutheran Leadership Ministries, where Charlie went to camp, or Making Headway Foundation, which provides care and comfort for children with brain and spinal cord tumors and research funding to find treatments and a cure.

Hopefully there will be an opportunity for you to see i love you and i always will or charlie’s play yourself in the future!!

With peace & harmony,

Steph