While We're Home
TRANSPORT GROUP’S WEEKLY COLUMN SERIES
While We’re Home is a weekly newsletter series of essays reflecting on Transport Group’s 20-year history from our leadership, alumni artists, and friends. Filled with humorous insight, personal growth, creative struggles and successes, we hope these columns will stand as a testament to the joys found in the process of collaboration through our 20-year catalogue. With a total of 96 essays, the series ran (nearly) every Friday from April 12, 2020 to April 8, 2022.
To catch up with our video series that expands on a select few essays, featuring John Cariani, David Lee Huynh, Nancy Shayne, David Aron Damane, and more, click here for While We’re Home: Extended Cut.
April 8, 2022: The Final essay
WHAT’S THIS I SEE?
by Jack Cummings III
In the final WHILE WE’RE HOME, our own Jack Cummings Ill asks a question that doesn’t have an answer, but searches for one anyway.
As my close friends know, I have had a song stuck in my head ever since the beginning of the pandemic. It sorta makes me laugh as well as haunts me. It’s Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Alfie.” The recurring phrase “What’s it all about, Alfie?” will not leave my head. It’s a question that irritates me as I don’t relish any deep introspection—I mean, that’s hard work! But the song persists—following me wherever I go any time of the damn day. Anyone in my role—a director and artistic director in the New York Off-Broadway non-profit sector—will tell you it is a relentless situation, to put it mildly. The constant anxiety about finances and fundraising alone are enough to put anyone over the edge daily. Then there is the endless battle of trying to exist in a landscape where most of the available oxygen is taken up by the commercial (Broadway) sector. All of this coupled with trying to create complex and challenging art—the reason we’re all here in the first place.
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