Review: What Comes Next?

I’ve always suffered from a fear of returning.

When I was young, that simply meant a fear of returning to work or to the end of a day. Exeter blew this fear out of proportion – I remember when I broke my parents’ hearts because I declined to take a weekend trip with them to Boston, simply because I knew I would have a quasi-panic attack on the car ride back onto campus. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be afraid to return home. Perhaps I already am.

The root of this fear is my unwillingness to accept uncertainty. If I could just accept that I’m powerless, maybe I’d ease up on my obsession to be able to know, process, and control every single variable around me. If I could just accept that I am unsafe, living precariously, then I might feel a little more secure, a little more warmth.

In the last few months, I felt as if I had been bogged down by family issues, ones that I concocted in my own mind. And on such an overwhelming evening as last Friday, my dear choral teacher Jerome Walker’s co-produced musical What Comes Next? really hit me.

His work traces, in non-linear time, the Fisher family’s recovery from the unexpected death of their son, Max. As someone who has dabbled in the arts of fan-fiction playwriting, I can tell you storytelling on the stage is not easy. The cast brings to life an emotional weight imagined by Walker and his friend, Noah Parnes, truly making this musical the most engaging and introspective that I’ve seen.

What struck me in this show first and foremost was the straightforward, quick-paced dialogue. Especially in the exchanges between Ellie Fisher and Chrysanthemum (brilliantly chosen name) Hastings in Act I, I felt there was a lack of subtext and everything just felt too...awkward. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. As Ellie said in the show, “It doesn’t have to be fake if you’re genuine.” Their open and emotionally vulnerable language is where I think we begin to see a certain blend of strength, forbearance, and trust –– qualities the family desperately needed to rebuild after Max’s death. The subtext of What Comes Next? lies in the minutiae, in the easily missable compliments, in the rare comments of reassurance, in the queer puns, in the meta-jokes, and of course, in its music.

I’m by no means an expert in music theory, but I want to discuss the musical motif of the show. The repeated arpeggiate three-note phrase reminds me of the musical’s three acts. We started off in the heaviest and loneliest place, when everyone was searching for an answer and trying to escape through the tunnel they dug with rusty spoons. Then we turned back time and saw what came before when we already know what comes next. It tasted like heavily burnt marshmallow –– bitter bitter bitter-not-very-sweet. And our emotional ride corresponds perfectly with the low, high, and higher-but-minor tones of the motif. (For the record, I find that the motif is highly reminiscent of Joni Mitchell’s introduction to “River,” which was an interpretation of Jingle Bells in the minor mode. Perhaps this is Walker’s take on a minor mode “Happy Birthday.”)

Grief is a hot topic right now, with the pandemic, WandaVision, and just a general loss of normalcy. All of that has become almost cliche. We’ve all lost Max. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that Max held the family together. Max is the lasagna, the original, “normal lasagna.” With Max gone, lasagna was a ratatouille-esque zucchini soup. And while each of us try to capture the essence of lasagna, the essence of Max, none of us really feel the same. Of course, we try to rationalize that as a new normal. 

I wonder if the whole musical was a recording of Aaron’s memory-related artificial intelligence. He wanted to build something that captured the unnoticed, the answers he would search for. Maybe he succeeded. And he showed us all this. Except that scene in the car. Because that’s the boundary. That’s his own answer. In any case, in that final act and final scene, Walker and Parnes played dramatic irony to the extreme. The Fisher family, of course, has no idea that Max was about to leave his home forever. But the dialogue and the cast’s delivery were so carefully crafted that I could feel an urgency and meta-awareness in their voice. Everyone in the family offers to grab the ice-cream, and in a way turning Max away from the heartbreaking accident we knew would occur anyway.

This tension builds up to my favorite song in the musical – “Grown-up Little Brother.” I’ve always wondered what life might be like with a sibling. This prophetess my family goes to once told my mom that she would have a son, then a daughter. I’m still a single child. Sometimes I feel like a younger sister would just be horrifically loud and annoying and I would never be capable of loving such a person. I guess the musical gave me four, five minutes room for imagination. Where I had an older sister, who was proud of seeing my growth, who loved me, and whom I respected and cared for and didn’t know I would never see again. The song’s lived in my mind rent free since Friday. Max’s suspension at the end is just a tear jerker.

This musical leaves us in a contemplative suspense. It showed us what came moments next after the very beginning, but never told us what came after that. Yet I’m confident that these characters will continue to grow, because none were ever static (not even Tim, the real insensitive jerk…he changed! He got dumped).

I won’t try to circle back to the beginning of this review and tie it altogether in some kind of poetic way. I’m still all too afraid to return. But I can tell you now that this musical has inspired me to change. To change how I feel about the unknown, how I feel about not holding onto the answers. I think it’s a lesson much too valuable for Exonians to miss.