by @mdebusk

There is something about revisiting a show that feels a bit like time travel. Simultaneously you’re Present You, the You who is working on the show today, and you’re also Past You, the You that you were when you first encountered the piece. Maybe you’re coming back to a show for the third, fourth, twentieth time, and you are the You at multiple stops along the way. Shows have a way of coming back around. We say they are timeless.

Jason Robert Browns’ The Last Five Years premiered in 2001 but continues to attract audiences and producers more than two decades later. A story told in opposing timelines, we meet our protagonists simultaneously at the end and the beginning of their relationship – with Cathy reading the letter that will lead to her divorce, and Jamie walking home from their very first date. The musical continues with Cathy moving backwards in time while Jamie moves forward, ending with Cathy waving goodbye on their first date, and Jamie leaving the letter that would end their marriage – the two characters intersecting only for one brief moment on their wedding day.

I recently found myself in a time traveler’s shoes while designing lights for a production of The Last Five Years at the Contemporary Theatre of Ohio. An apt show to experience both the future and the past. 

The Last Five Years was the very first show I ever took myself to see. It was my first semester in college. Newly independent and living away from my family for the first time, I did what any self-respecting intended theatre major would do – I went to the theatre. Any show would do. Didn’t particularly matter. Just a show that was running, that I could get to without a car, and that wasn’t going to break my nonexistent budget. And so I ended up in the audience for a student group’s production of The Last Five Years.

The show was staged in the theatre department’s black box, which was (and is still) housed in a “temporary” facility installed on campus 40 years prior to my enrollment at the university. Surprisingly, the space had very recently undergone a major lighting renovation. The 2008 recession dashed any hope of a new building but yielded the remains of a nascent investment which was used to immediately outfit the 1960s structure with state of the art technology. 

Coming from a high school theatre tucked underneath the bleachers of the gymnasium, I had never seen a light that could change color or move without having to climb a ladder (or without the basketball team doing significant running drills above our heads). I am mesmerized by the spectacle. I am lost in the songs (we may not have had funding for a theatre building, but we did have the best music program in the state). And I am swept away by possibility and ambition.

I blink, and now it’s late spring of 2020. I’m sitting on a porch with my housemates, mostly theatre artists, who are out of work and unsure of what happens next but bursting at the seams with untapped energy. “What if we did The Last Five Years?” “We could do it outside and socially distanced.” “They could stay six feet apart. They don’t even have to touch.” Someone starts the original cast recording. We listen all the way through. It repeats. We don’t move. We keep dreaming – it’s not like we have anywhere else to be.

Blink again –  it’s 2025. Fifteen years since Past Me started this journey. I’m teaching at a university. I’m living in a new state. I’ve somehow survived to be the responsible adult in the room more often than I’d like to admit. And I again find myself in a black box housed inside of a building built 40 years before I got here that was recently outfitted with a major lighting renovation. And The Last Five Years is still playing in front of me. 

We create temporal art. An art of the moment. This moment. And the moment before. And the one before that. And the moment that is next. And the one after that. And after that.

We create art that speaks to what Is by way of what Was and because of what Will Be. Revisiting The Last Five Years reminded me of that. Of the complexity of time and its many facets. Of the messiness of humans, and our egos, our miscommunications, our dreams. Dreams that take us to something by way of taking us away from something else. 

We create for Present Us, and Past Us, and Future Us. Though we experience each of these steps distinctly and independently, we create with a synthesis of all of Us together, at once, speaking to who we are, who we were, and who we will be. It’s what brings us back to the work again and again. 

We say that art comes back around because it is timeless. But that’s not it. Not because it is timeless, but because it is time-full.

The production of The Last Five Years pictured here was produced by The Contemporary Theatre of Ohio in Columbus, OH. It ran April 26 to May 11, 2025. Artistic Director: Leda Hoffmann; Executive Director: Christy Farnbauch; Production Manager: Tony Koehler; Director and Accompanist: Lenny Leibowitz; Scenic Designer: Katherine Simon; Lighting Designer: Maranda DeBusk; Costume Designer: Anna Grywalski; Sound Designer: Dave Wallingford; Stage Manager: Jackie Benedict; Performers: Hunter Minor and Melanie Sierra.