Cue to Cue

Emily Decker

Although you wouldn’t know it from most notable paintings of him, Thomas Jefferson was a redhead. I know this because I have dyed my hair a rusty claret-red to play him in an all-woman and nonbinary production of 1776: The Musical. 

If you know, you know (or you’ve seen the 1972 movie version). But if you don’t (or haven’t), 1776 is one of those mid-twentieth-century musical classics that is beloved, problematic, and long. Yet, when performed by a cast of those who weren’t historically allowed in the rooms where the fate of American independence was debated and declared 250 years ago, we might just have something worth asking people to spend three hours of their lives watching.

In terms of playing Jefferson, the Virginian and writer in me is proud, the woman and millennial American in me is conflicted, and the new redhead me can’t stop looking at herself—and how the more coppery strands catch the light from the rectangle of bulbs around my dressing room mirror.

I feel like someone I should know better.

John Adams is next to me, applying mascara. Benjamin Franklin is recounting a joke her husband told her this morning. Abigail Adams is untangling her hairpiece.

We are in tech: the those days before opening night when all the elements of a production come together—lights, sound, costumes, staging. Each day presents new layers to incorporate and countless adjustments to scenes we’ve been rehearsing for weeks. 

Tech rehearsals are clarifying yet tedious hours of clocking one potential issue after another, all while delivering blocking and lines. My internal dialogue has been something like this:

“Virginia abstains.” OK, the bench is farther downstage than I thought. Turn in more to catch Martha’s entrance. “He’s asleep.” See the glow tape and don’t trip over Franklin. Remember, violin and bow in downstage hand, and go under Martha’s arms when you hug her. Dammit, my mic needs to be on the other cheek. Caress face or hair? Yup, face. Lovey eyes, lovey eyes . . . aaand don’t step on her skirt as we run down the steps.

Every show requires character development, regardless of the role. But this one has been a bit of a mindfuck. I came to it anticipating everything and nothing, except what it would be like to play a lovelorn, thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson as a single forty-one-year-old woman.

As a backdrop to real life, rehearsing for this show has felt like a theatre scrim: 

Under front-facing light, the messiness of it all gets swept into shadow, and I’m left in the glow of what I need to be true now: about love, about my craft, and about the collective potential of people to change the course of human events in the face of tyranny.

When lit from behind, I’m a perimenopausal woman with a semipermanent dye job and a lot of feelings draped in a colonial costume held up by safety pins. 

But I’m not alone. I’m surrounded by beautiful humans—all dealing with their own shadows and light spills.

A cast mate recently described us as emotional junkies. She’s not wrong. We know that what we do is ephemeral. Actors live between their cues until the final bows. We build and end marriages, alliances, and wars within the span of weeks. It’s heady—and with this cast, positively Sapphic. 

For me, the drug has never been the performance but rather the ritual of intimacies I know I can count on for a few sacred weeks: the quiet waiting in the wings, the held gazes, the crunch of tight harmonies, a shared handhold, the hush as the last note sits in the air before the applause.

But I’m not naive about the endings—for Jefferson, for me as Jefferson, for me.

When we leave the stage that final time, we’ll take our shots at the bar, share cigarettes, give lingering hugs and “I love-you”s, and make our plans to drink and work with each other again, soon, yes, soon. We’ll wake up and deal with our respective Mondays and post-show blues. And then, it’ll be summer in this America.

Tonight, though, we have our final dress rehearsal with our first audience. We are buzzing on adrenaline, caffeine, and a few crushes. We have reflected and refracted each other’s energy for weeks, all of us in various eras of refining our own identities—as partners and parents, as siblings and friends, and as bodies who have never gotten to tell this American story.

But on the stage, there is no question. 

We are shes and theys, and we are storied. We are founders and national treasures. Books will be written about each of us—even the forgotten names. Our words will be etched on monuments, and our signatures will become the scrawled symbols of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Places are called. The lights go down. I tuck a stray strand of hair behind my ear as we all step onto our revolving stage. The battle drum begins, and the stage turns. Spotlight on Adams. “Good God, what the hell are they waiting for?” is our first cue to sing.