Moving Toward…Something

David Russell Beach
2 min readSep 9, 2024

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September 9, 2024

One of my graduate students is writing future-thinking essays. We talked about it in class last week, and I thought it might be a good exercise for me. I’m at one of those proverbial junctions in life where there’s more behind me than ahead, and I’ve been more reflective in this past year as I think about retirement. But there’s a whole lot of time left to do a whole lot of things!

I’m staring at the Sondheim poster on my office wall. In his late 80s and early 90s, he was still creating. A few days before he died, he sat for an interview with the New York Times, talking about his final project, what would become Here We Are. My dad finished his bachelor’s degree when he was 63, my age now. While he still had to endure a few more years with my mom (that’s a topic for another essay), he began to live and thrive in his later years, only slowing down in his late 80s. I often quip, “I am my father’s son.”

Over the past few years, my aim was to create a permanent home for my theatre company. Post-pandemic, people aren’t going to the theatre as they did. Many well-established companies have either downsized or closed; small companies struggle. I haven’t given up the dream, but it’s critical to have an audience to keep the doors open.

I still have stories to tell. I have the treatment for Barton House, a screenplay about my entire family following me to a high-rise apartment near Washington, DC. I have three solid drafts of plays — Just Do It, about high school football players based on Colin Kaepernick’s action of taking a knee; Moving Toward Equinox, about the first American and Russian female presidents holding a secret meeting on Svalbard; and one currently titled Common Law about a throuple who loses a member to death. They sit on my desk (or more correctly in the cloud) waiting for me. Why am I waiting? These plays need feet!

(An irony: I set Moving Toward Equinox in January 2025, right after the first female has been inaugurated president in the US. I may have to revise the play in a few months so the US president calls the new Russian president to offer congratulations on succeeding Putin!)

I recently saw a reel with Lin-Manuel Miranda talking to students, and two things he said resonated: “Go in with all the light you can manage. Try to grab them.” -and- “Push through it. What’s the alternative? You’re going to leave that idea stuck in your head forever? That sucks. The alternative is you go through life, and you had this great idea and nothing came of it because you got tired.”

I need to play that reel on repeat for a while! It’s the motivation I need to keep working at the plays, the screenplays, the theatre. There are worlds out there to create and share! Thanks, Lin. And thanks, Abby!

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David Russell Beach

David Beach is playwright/writer, director, dramaturg, and educator. He holds a PhD in education and an MFA in playwriting, and is a professor at Radford U.