Contemplating the idea of transitions—between seasons, stages of life, or even defining moments
As we near the end of another year, we at T. Schreiber are contemplating the idea of transitions—between seasons, stages of life, or even defining moments. And, as autumn turns to winter, we’re taking time to reflect on our incredible 2024-2025 season. We’re especially struck by how our characters encountered their own kinds of transitions, from Small Mouth Sounds to As You Like It to the short plays of The Schreiber Shorts: It Happened to Me.
But perhaps the most difficult part of any transition is the “in-between” phase. This year, our characters navigated that liminal moment between phases, realities, and states of mind. Across the forest, woods, and the settings of everyday life, they shed their old identities to step outside their ordinary realities, knowing they can never return unchanged.
These transformations are rarely comfortable, as our characters’ journeys showed. We witnessed how they can bring forward emotional shifts and psychological possibilities that are messy, confusing, and ambiguous. And the topic of the liminal transition is no stranger to the theatre, with many notable shows tackling this theme, including Sartre’s No Exit, Kushner’s Angels in America, and the currently-running Waiting For Godot. Alongside, T. Schreiber’s 2024-2025 productions offered a compelling look at these transitions. Through the lives of diverse characters, we journeyed through the disorienting but vital spaces that divide the old self from the new . . .
“After this, you don’t ever have to go back to who you were.”
–Small Mouth Sounds
In our fall 2024 production of Beth Wohl’s Small Mouth Sounds, six characters enter the transitional space of the silent retreat by choice. Guided by a disembodied teacher, each retreat member goes inward, arriving at a physical and metaphorical in-between space of reckoning. Suspending normal communication, we witness them navigate the threshold between who they were and the possibility of who they can be.
As the retreat teacher reminds us with the parable of the frog who lived at the bottom of a well, “…when you see the ocean… You may not be able to return. To the well.”
But even though we can’t return, what emerges on the other side of the liminal space can be ambiguous. As each character’s story closes, we are reminded that the renewed, healed self they hoped to find is neither guaranteed nor complete. These transitions, we see, often remain open-ended.
“All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts.”
–As You Like It, II.VII.139-142
Moving from the woods to the Forest of Arden. The characters in our Spring 2025 production of As You Like It crossed their own thresholds. Here, the characters step into the boundary between a corrupt, hierarchical world and one where social order is dissolved. In a space neither fully civilized nor purely wild. They test new roles and shed old selves, emboldened by disguise, exile, and chance encounters.
Rosalind as Ganymede is especially resonant with the theme of transitions. Her disguise is a liminal identity, enabling her to become a version of herself that cannot be unwound once she reemerges from the forest.
On the other side of Arden, we see the characters leave the space of self-becoming for a new reality. Physically, they are the same as before, but we sense change in them as they establish a social order. Grounded in harmony and self-awareness.
It Happened to Me.
Departing the forest, the short plays of our Summer 2025 Schreiber Shorts: It Happened to Me contemplated what these transitional moments and spaces look like in daily life. Beginning in the cabins of a curmudgeonly country woman; moving to the brutal landscape of a thoroughly modern war. Starting with the allure of the blue phone light when you just can’t sleep; shifting to a rave ringing in the new year. Emerging out of the heaviness of grief; arriving at the corner bakery you just can’t quit. Ending in the bleachers — the spot from which you can never return the same.
Beyond the Liminal
One thing is certain when we look back at our 2024-2025 season. Once you enter the silence, or the forest, or the moment it happened, you cannot return unchanged.
The transition itself marks the point of no return.
For us, what lies on the other side of our transition is another exciting season . . . one where we’re excited to explore what happens afterward. In the end. When the stories we tell ourselves about success and survival collapse. When we overcome ambiguity, the future and past dissolve into the present.
Till Next Time,
The Schreiber Scribe