I had an errant thought this morning of a boy I knew in elementary school. I remembered that when we were given the assignment to act out something from Shakespeare, he and I had done the first scene from ROMEO AND JULIET, which is not a romantic scene between the hero and heroine but just the choice of play got giggles from our audience. (It was the only Shakespeare I could find on the shelf at home.) Later, near puberty and some degree of identity confusion on my part, I remember him saying something viciously homophobic about me that I could say didn’t upset me that much, except hey, I still remember it, don’t I? So in that way we do these days, I thought I’d try to track him down online, see what became of him. Well, I found him. It turns out he lived a very full life, but as well apparently suffered from depression and killed himself twelve years ago. I also recently looked up a jocky, breathtakingly pretty boy from high school who, in retrospect, I thought had wanted to instigate something sexual/romantic with me on many occasions but whom I’d been too scared to take up on the offer. I found his obituary also. He married for the first time (a woman, his best friend for years apparently) late in life and died not long after of cancer. So hard sometimes to match the bright young faces in our memory with the way lives actually unfold, and end.
Richard Willett
Richard Willett is the author of the plays Triptych, Random Harvest, The Flid Show, and Tiny Bubbles, presented off-off-Broadway and across the country. Honors include an Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship. His play 9/10 premiered off-off-Broadway in September 2024 and won four Broadway World Awards including Best Play; Grief at High Tide (first prize, Capital Rep Next Act! New Play Summit) premiered at Vivid Stage in Summit, NJ, in October 2024; and A Terminal Event (Julie Harris Award winner and Woodward/Newman finalist) premiered in 2022 at the Victory Theatre in Burbank, with Stage Raw naming it one of the best L.A. plays that year. Richard is developing a one-woman show about Ingrid Bergman with actress Annemette Andersen and director Henning Hegland, premiering in 2025 in Iceland. He was a finalist last year for the Dramatists Guild National Fellows Program and as an optioned, working screenwriter has twice been in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Nicholl Top 50 and a finalist for the Sundance Labs. He was also a finalist for the Cynosure Diversity Screenwriting Awards, the Stage 32 Diverse Voices Springboard, and won the Lonely Seal Film Festival award for the best script with a disabled lead. His novel A Friend of Dorothy’s, set during the height of the AIDS crisis in New York City in the late 1980s, was in June 2025.