As if by some dark magic
I can't believe she's gone.
Last week, I published an impassioned elegy to The Phantom of the Opera, on the occasion of its closing on Broadway after a 35-year run.
The next night, my friend, frequent theatre colleague and all-time Sarah Brightman superfan, Jaie Deschene, died suddenly at the age of 36. “The Angel of Music has her under his wing,” posted a mutual friend, and I couldn’t help but bitterly follow up with the next line from the song, “Make no attempt to see her again.”
Since then, I’ve been kind of at a loss. Going to sleep and getting out of bed, figuring out how or what to eat, getting work done, writing anything coherent—it’s been remarkably impossible. Another mutual friend said she felt both hollow and yet somehow filled with lead, and I couldn’t agree more. Jaie’s death is unthinkable, and so my brain and body have been very busily not thinking about it. The best I’ve been able to do is toggle between numb non-functionality and hot tears, while occasionally being able to accept, however reluctantly, that this is one way grief can look.
It doesn’t help, at all, that just a week before Jaie another beautiful queer performer in my community, also 36, also died suddenly. It has been shattering to so many of us, and of course I can’t help but look around in a panic thinking, “who’s next?” Is it not enough, I keep thinking, that my country is doing its damnnest to try and kill LGBTQIA people? Do the ones around me also need to die at random, too young, out of nowhere?
This week has also been nightmarish for grieving, because I’ve been in tech for a show for the first time since 2019. Every night this week, I’ve had to drag myself to the theatre and do the job. Then again, it’s somehow appropriate: she would have wanted, above all else, for the proverbial show to go proverbially on. The show itself, too, is somehow appropriate to my feeling-state: it’s an adaptation of the great silent film Metropolis, in which a robot takes the shape and face of a woman trying to do good in the world and leads the denizens of an industrial nightmare city to destruction in the guise of a workers’ revolt. I play a dead character, narrating the story from the beyond, helpless to influence it or make it turn out differently.
It’s been three days since I found out, and while I’m not holding out hope for a resurrection however divine Jaie may have been, I might be ready to say at least a few words about what she meant to me. Or at least, some brief vignettes.
I first met Jaie during a show called 2010: Our Hideous Future: The Musical! Written by then-local nerd-geniuses Carl Danielson and Andy Hicks, the show was an ‘80s-sci-fi musical comedy pastiche in which I played the protagonist Kate Brick, a human revolutionary fighting the supremacy of our inevitable robot overlords.
Jaie was cast as my foil and Javert/Freddy Krueger mashup: a deadly robot assassin known as Nadpeeler. (Yes, really.) We sang together, fought each other Fake-Matrix style, insulted each other’s monikers and methods, and finally battled to the death. We first did the show at Boston Playwrights in 2010, then again at the Oberon in 2011, then in NYC in 2012. In between we did stints at Improv Boston’s Geek Week, fundraisers and events with pop-up performances of the songs, a recording of a cast album, and countless other things. We met up in 2015 to do a read-thru of the script to celebrate the 5th anniversary. For several years, this show was sort of my life, and the cast in many ways became a family.
Some of us were closer than others, as happens with any cast and crew. But for a time, Jaie and I were pretty close. And she…gods it’s so hard to describe just how funny she was. I wish I could just remember every time she made me fall down laughing, and just upload the experiences straight into your brains. She was such a unique soul, forever doing some kind of hilarious voice, saying something totally out of left field, breaking into deliberately overdramatic song (always with excellent vocal production), or expressing a strong if unpopular opinion as if it were the word of God.
About which: I know that even had she lived, I would never have gotten to prove to her how wrong she was about Stephen Sondheim. But much sadder to me is that we’ll never get to have that argument again.
While she loved to play the curmudgeon, at the same time she was incredibly kind, and unrelentingly supportive of others’ talent. She would frequently poke fun, but I only ever felt a sense of her admiration for me, even as I was admiring her so highly. It was a tiny moment, but I’ll never forget telling Jaie—Jaie, of the heavenly singing voice—that Annie Lennox was my singing role model, and she told me that I already sounded like her. I don’t think for a moment that that’s true, but I do believe she was sincere in saying it. She didn’t pull punches, but she didn’t blow smoke either: a compliment from Jaie could be counted on to be genuine.
Which is also how she approached her work in the theatre. Especially in the past few years, when I wasn’t spending time with her as much, I know she was constantly working, and I can’t count the shows that she caused to happen, in so many venues, as writer, director, producer and actor. She was always driven by passion and belief in the power of art, and a fearlessness in choosing material she loved. She had no time for those who didn’t vibe with her idiosyncrasies or understand her tastes. She uncompromisingly did what delighted her, no matter what others thought.
After ‘2010,’ I had the honor of working with Jaie in various other configurations: I assistant directed on Bent, with her doing a devastating turn as Greta. She assistant directed for me on The Baltimore Waltz, and the scenes she directed (the Berlin nightclub scene in particular!) crackled with precision and wit. She directed me in Trojan Women, and gave me the opportunity to let ‘er rip, goddess-style, as Athena. And when I worked as AD and dialect coach on The Importance of Being Earnest, I mostly remember that Jaie’s unforgettable Lady Bracknell had no notes from me. I just got to enjoy her flawless upper-class British accent and her always-impeccable comic timing.
In some funereal traditions, people do what’s called a “wake;” I can only wish that such a thing were possible. Resurrection jokes aside (and even now I can Jaie’s voice in a high, comically nasal register saying to me, “God dyyyammit Kyamela, why’d you have to tell Jesus to suck it?”), I only wish that we could wake her somehow. Or that we could wake, bleary-eyed and muzzy-headed, shake the cobwebs away and realize slowly, joyfully, that it was all a dream. Perhaps we’d hear some bizarre line of dialogue in our heads from that dream, the way she so often did. Perhaps it would be Jaie herself, turning to us, raising an eyebrow and saying, “Don’t be ridiculous, the tomatoes only dance at night!”
As it is, I can only wish that she is resting well and enjoying her next adventure. The afterlife, whatever it is, is definitely a more entertaining place now that she’s in it.
I’m not ready to say goodbye just yet. I’m happy in some way that I’m finally able to write something, anything, about this horrendous loss. But I cannot soften the fact that it is, in fact, a horrendous loss. The best I can do is say it aloud, and help tell her story.
I miss her so much. I wish I'd kept in better touch after moving out of the area. 😿