Matthew López talks ‘Reverberation’

“David Lindsay-Abaire wrote his play Rabbit Hole in response to a prompt that he write something (in that play’s case, the death of a child) that frightened him. For me, writing Reverberation came from a similar impulse—I spent much of my youth as a young queer man of color feeling unsafe. The place and the time I grew up in (the American south in the ’80s and ’90s) did not prioritize people like me when discussing “public safety”. (In fact, people like me are often blamed for the deterioration of such “public safety”, making it even easier to justify acts of violence against us.)”

In writing Reverberation, I challenged myself to imagine the thing I was most afraid of actually happening to me. How would I move on from it? Would I move on from it? How would it affect my ability to trust, to find intimacy? What would my relationship to strangers be going forward?

As I wrote and developed the play, I was surprised to learn that my assumptions about my supposed reaction to this supposed event were wrong. Jonathan, my avatar, does of course retreat like I know I would. But he also ultimately finds solace in the last place I would personally think to look—in the kindness of strangers. That, to me, was revelatory and fascinating and deeply hopeful. I allowed him to teach me what I could not myself intuit.

As a result, I’ve come to see the play as something completely different than the one I thought I was writing 17 years ago. Yes, it is about the justified fear of danger in the world. And yes, it is very much about the loneliness of big cities. But it’s also a play about trust. Trust becomes harder to engender over the course of a lifetime. Our experiences simply don’t allow for too much of it as we age. And yet trust, that dangerous and elusive human quality, is the key to healing, and the key to intimacy.

In writing these words, I wonder if I have mistitled the play. Perhaps, if Hernan Diaz hadn’t beaten me to it, Trust would have been a better title. Perhaps it is the title that 47 year-old Matthew would have used. But this play was written by 30 year-old Matthew and we won’t second guess him. I will let my youthful self have his say."

Matthew López – writer, Reverberation