To Be Mustardseed

During the fall of 1994, while my friends were (attempting to) slam-dunk basketballs, jamming out to Green Day’s “Dookie”, and trying to appear more repressed than their upper-middle-class upbring in suburban Connecticut would allow, I was backstage at Fairfield High School, carefully drawing pastel stars onto my freshly whitened cheeks and wondering what I’d done, exactly, in my life that had led to this moment.

I was Mustardseed. A fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Not Puck, who gets all the mischief. Not Bottom, who gets all the laughs and also turns into a donkey. Not even Lysander, who at the very least gets entangled in heterosexual confusion and gets to kiss a girl … something I’d yet to experience. No. I was Mustardseed.

The fairy so minor that if Shakespeare were alive today and you asked him about the role, he’d probably squint and say, “That does sound like something I might have written after absinthe and kidney failure.”

Mustardseed has one line. One. It’s “And I.” That’s it. That’s all of five characters, including the space. It is the dramatic equivalent of being cast as “Tree #3” in The Lorax, but with more glitter and less eco-consciousness. If you blink during my moment, you miss the entirety of my verbal contribution to Elizabethan literature.

To begin, we should probably go back a few years.

I was never an actor. At least, not a good actor. I thought I was, sure. But looking back at old VHS tapes of my performances reveal a gawky kid whose only acting move was to squint and stutter. I didn’t even have the tortured, misunderstood soul that earns bad actors a kind of tragic romance. What I had was an abnormally high singing voice. Bee Gees high. Choir-directors-treat-you-like-you’re-the-Messiah high. In eighth grade, I was cast as the Artful Dodger in Oliver! and delivered what can only be described as an above-average performance. (Lots of squinting mixed with a thickly laid on Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins cockney accent.) I hit my marks. I wore a top hat. I sang like a Dickensian castrato.

I was also selected for All-State Choir, which, while sounding impressive, awkwardly placed me as the only boy in a sea of alto girls. The other boys, or men at this point, were probably comparing chest hair in the baritone section. At the same time, I, was more afraid of girls than attracted to them, was practicing my warm-ups in a hormonal fever dream of fear and falsetto, wedged between two altos named Emily who discussed The Baby-Sitters Club with the gravitas of a Russian novel.

And then. Puberty.

One day, I was serenading audiences with crystal-clear renditions of “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” and the next, I sounded like a malfunctioning didgeridoo. My voice dropped like the Nasdaq in ’87. Gone was the ethereal boy alto. In his place stood a lanky teen with cystic acne and the speaking voice of a regional NPR host reading farming statistics. I still loved being in plays, though. The lights. The costumes. The scent of singed hair and desperation backstage. It was magic.

So when auditions rolled around for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I went in with the reckless enthusiasm of someone who had recently memorized several of Matthew Broderick’s monologues from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off just to entertain himself in geometry class.

I auditioned for Bottom. Obviously. He’s the clown. He’s the fool. He’s the everyman turned literal ass. It was basically tailor-made for a former choir boy with newly-acquired baritone sarcasm and an unused joke-a-minute delivery system.

But Ms. K, our drama teacher and benevolent purveyor of teenage discomfort, had other plans.

She cast me as Mustardseed.

To her credit, she did pull me aside and offer a quiet, serious conversation in which she informed me, delicately, that I would be the only male fairy. The tone she used was not unlike the one you might use to tell a child their dog had gone to live on a farm. I nodded. I said it was fine. I swallowed my pride like I was auditioning for a role in a Greek tragedy about repressed theater boys. And I said yes. But I spent the short ride home in the back of my mom’s car wondering if, in fact, I’d made the right decision. By the time I woke up the next morning, I convinced myself that I had to take the part.

Because I had made a commitment.

And because, like a true teenage thespian addicted to humiliation, I genuinely liked being in plays.

Now, the role of Mustardseed, while cosmically insignificant in the Shakespearean canon, was given a bit of extra stage time by Ms. K—by which I mean, she had us fairies (Peaseblossom, Cobweb, and yours truly) constantly peering around faux foliage like Elizabethan meerkats, attempting to mime interest in what was happening downstage. We fluttered through invisible pollen. We leaned into non-verbal communication with all the nuance of a third-rate French street performer who’d just watched a Marcel Marceau highlight reel and thought, “Yes. I shall convey all of existence with just my body.”

Our movement work was described by no one as “haunting.”

For the costume, I was told to paint my face a flat chalk white and to draw pastel stars on my cheeks using makeup pencils I’d borrowed from a girl named Megan who listened to Sarah McLachlan on cassette and had intense opinions about My So-Called Life. When the show ended each night, the makeup had fused to my skin with the adhesive strength of a Fabergé egg dipped in Krazy Glue. Removing it required an exfoliating ritual that surely destroyed several layers of my dermis and, to this day, may be why I cannot grow a proper beard.

The final effect, after an hour under stage lights, was that I looked like David Bowie’s forgotten cousin, David Bow-ish, who had taken a nap in a vat of dollar-store glitter and woken up in suburban Connecticut with a single line and several regrets.

And yet. I showed up. Night after night. I stood silently in my pastel shame, powdered and shimmering, saying “And I” with the gravitas of a man who knew that the fate of the play, and possibly the universe, depended on it. I did not quit. I did not run.

I was Mustardseed. And I was proud.

Not because I transformed the role. Not because I wowed the audience. Not because some astute literary critic gasped at my performance and declared me the next Branagh. I was proud because I had said yes to something strange and uncomfortable and stuck with it. I had been part of a story, however absurd, however sparkly.

There is a strange nobility to being the only male fairy in a Shakespeare production performed in a high school theater in a town where the biggest cultural event was getting a Sam Goody downtown. It’s not glamorous. But it’s real.

And then, a lovely plot twist.

The following summer, I was cast in Iolanthe, a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta performed by the Fairfield County Student Operetta Workshop, which, while sounding like a scam invented by 19th-century grifters, was very much real, and a fantastic production company with incredible talent (yours truly, notwithstanding). In it, I played one of the lords, or a duke. Maybe I was a viscount. I wore a robe, so whatever that made me. A strong, male role. A stately aristocrat with lines, posture, and some dignity.

And then, at the end of Act II, I was turned into a fairy.

This is not a metaphor.

After all that anxiety, all that face paint, all that Neutrogena-wielding backstage therapy, I found myself, again, in wings. Again sparkling. Again, flitting about like a majestic woodland insect with stage presence.

But this time, I leaned in. If I were going to be typecast, I’d earn it.

Because sometimes the parts that seem small are the ones that stick. Sometimes the role you didn't want, the one that embarrassed you, the one that involved peeking from behind paper trees in leggings your mom bought because you were too embarrassed, turns out to be the one you remember forever. The one that taught you the power of saying yes, of showing up, of saying “And I” like you mean it.

Years later, when people ask me about high school, I do not tell them about the SATs or skipping school to go skiing. I tell them about Mustardseed.

Because that is the story that matters.

That, and the fact that once, in 1994, I was the only male fairy on stage. And I played the glitter out of it.