'If/Then' on Broadway

You could spin 1986 — when I left a reporting job at The Washington Post, drove cross-country and moved in with five strangers — in a dozen different ways, but the truth is that accident played a starring role in what happened that year. It was chance, as much as choice, that bent the rest of my life.

Why Portland? Why not Arizona, Wisconsin, or one of the other states whose VISTA directors I queried by phone from my teensy D.C. studio apartment? Why, after circling ten different ads for shared housing in Portland’s alternative weekly, and visiting six of them, did I end up in the two back rooms on 32nd Avenue, with one housemate who rationed the toilet paper and another who dangled a chunk of quartz over his dinner to decide if it was safe to eat?

And was it intuition, destiny, or dumb luck that landed me at Outside In, a social service agency whose director introduced herself by saying, “Hi, I’m a radical lesbian separatist, and if you come to work here, you can ask me what that means.”

Rewind to the D.C. apartment, the pin in the map, the half-blind grope that led me not just to the opposite coast but, in time, to the woman I love, the books I wrote, the daughter I parent with astonishment and joy.

It was that daughter who joined me at the Richard Rodgers Theatre a few weeks back, in first-row seats we’d landed thanks to good fortune in the rush ticket lottery for If/Then, a stunning new musical starring Idina Menzel. The irony of entering a raffle for seats to a Broadway show about chance, choice, and fate was not lost on either of us, and I indulged in my own little game of what if as we waited for the house lights to dim.

What if the Q train we took uptown from Soho had been late that day? What if the woman pinching names from the lottery basket had reached a touch to the left? Go back further; what if I had chosen to join VISTA in Wisconsin or Arizona? What if I hadn’t put that “seeking writing partner” note on the bulletin board at the women’s bookstore? Or if I hadn’t called back when someone named Elissa responded to my query? If we’d never fallen in love? The stunning, impatient 13-year-old next to me would not exist.

The most minor of choices

That’s the tangled trip Menzel’s character, Elizabeth, takes throughout If/Then. Obsessed with second-guessing, she frets not about life’s big choices (she’s left her marriage before the play’s action starts) but about the small, seemingly minor decisions that will, inevitably, determine What Comes Next: Go to the park to hear music with a friend, or report to the housing demonstration with a different pal? Answer the cell phone call with the unfamiliar area code, or let it go?

In If/Then, Elizabeth does both. The play unspools in parallel storylines: As “Liz,” she goes to the park, meets The Guy, and marries him, while as “Beth,” she takes the phone call, which leads to a plum job as a city planner and a cavalcade of complications.

Menzel shifts from Liz to Beth as smoothly as toggling a switch, mid-scene or even mid-song, with a few visual cues to help viewers discern which storyline we’re following (tortoiseshell glasses denote Liz; shucking the sweater means Beth is back on the scene). In both, she’s beset with what might have been, restless with the present and insistent on trying to glimpse what lies ahead.

The first act ends — of course, this is an Idina Menzel musical — with “Surprise,” a song so big it could peel paint off the ceiling, and a life-defining moment for both Liz and Beth. In the rustle of intermission, I asked my daughter, “So, what do you think she’ll do? What will she choose?”

My pragmatic teen was quiet for a moment. “It’s not really about what she’ll choose. It’s about what will happen.”

Wise girl. At 22, I thought I knew where my Post reporting path would lead: I’d advance from the Arlington bureau to the downtown office, marry another journalist, and graduate from the teensy studio to an Adams-Morgan townhouse. Remaining in D.C. meant a life of convention; leaving flung open the door to bold adventure.

A winding, intersecting path

But If/Then confounds that notion. We can’t predict what would have happened on the path we didn’t choose. What’s more, we can’t even see past the next bend of the road we’re on. What appears to be a simple, even clichéd dichotomy for Liz/Beth — on one hand, marriage and kids; on the other, a high-octane career — is soon muddied by life itself.

The play, with its constellation of New York characters — Liz/Beth’s best friends are an African-American lesbian and a bisexual man — also reminds us that we’re not navigating alone. We’re constantly colliding with other people’s stories, bumping their lives in this direction or that with a gesture, a promise, an argument, or a betrayal, while they’re simultaneously steering us in an undulation of influence and response. We leave our print everywhere we go, on everyone we touch.

I want my daughter — an unsentimental atheist, a girl who likes to know at breakfast time what we’re having for dinner — to savor a smorgasbord of options in school, at work, and in love. I want her to embrace the unknown while knowing that her choices matter — that they will define the contours of her days and the depth of her soul. I want her to ask the Big Questions: Is life’s unfolding a matter of mere accident? Is it intelligent design, a God equipped with CAD software? Or are we the ultimate shapers of our destinies?

And what better place to start than in this theater, where, after two acts and 22 songs, Menzel’s character (both of them) realizes that life just keeps happening: a cascade of choices and chances, paths pursued and paths ignored. You can’t ever know what will happen next. All you can do is cling to the people you love, to the life you’ve made, and keep making, with every fleeting moment.

I might have been and done so many other things. But I landed here, in this lucky instant, with my daughter beside me, rolling her Aegean blue eyes while I wiped tears from mine, as the woman onstage with the outsize voice sang “Always Starting Over.” We both clapped wildly when Menzel took her bow, and then we streamed out, with all the rest, into the crazed and crowded New York night.