This is an excerpt from Robinson’s full essay “Tick, Tick, Tick...Reflections on My Friendship With Jonathan Larson”
On Thursday, January 25, 1996, I was sitting in a steamy, cedar hot tub in Park City, Utah. It was the very best of times. I was there premiering my documentary tribute to film director William Wellman. I’d interviewed Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, Sidney Poitier, and dozens of other screen legends. Robert Redford had introduced me and the film at his Sundance Film Festival, and my family was there to see it.
I had just spent the previous year at the side of film luminary and mentor Ridley Scott, traveling the world as he transformed one of my early scripts, White Squall, into a big-time Hollywood movie. I caught myself wondering if this was really all happening to me.
Holding the hand of our four-your-old, Tyler, my wife, Elizabeth, interrupted my private reverie with four words, forever burned into my mind. “Jonathan Larson is dead.” It all came crashing down.
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Jonathan was my roommate throughout college at Adelphi University, later in New York City in those formative days, and, until the end of his life, one of my very best friends.
Since the moment of his passing, I’ve had a complicated relationship with Jonathan’s work. I deeply love it, but it has also, for decades, forced me to repeatedly relive my grief.
So many of the efforts to present Jon’s work have been wonderful, and yet they often echo with a distant hollowness I can’t quite put my finger on. His absence and simultaneous presence are inescapable, confusing, and painful.
Since his death, we who loved him attend openings in solidarity with the creators, in memoriam of our friend, to share with each performer some intimacy, a personal anecdote or two so they too might feel closer to the man whose art they are about to inhabit. In spite of the joy and excitement of these triumphs, there is a lingering sadness. To endure having that scab ripped open again and again for 26 years has been difficult. We all had plans to move forward together, those of us in our geek theater “tribe,” our “Island of Misfit Toys.”
We were supposed to raise children and bury our parents together, create, collaborate, argue...go to Mets games and grow old hating the Yankees, while always, always remaining the bodyguards of each other’s dreams, trusted critics of our separate works, and in the end, be no more or less to each other than we all were in the beginning—those wistful days when everything was possible, when we found our people, each other, ourselves, and forged a collective mission and unbreakable bond.
Then came the film adaptation of Tick, Tick...Boom! I braced myself at the Los Angeles premiere of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s freshman directing effort about my friend, sitting near Jon’s sister, Julie, and her now grown sons. I dreaded reliving the recreated apartment and the Moondance Diner—going back to the literal physical spaces of a personal trauma. I was afraid it was going to hurt, as it so often has.
But this was not to be. Maybe for the first time since Jon’s passing, his work was infused with joy, hope, a lightness of being that was saying everything is still possible in this moment.
I felt Lin-Manuel and Jonathan clarifying the point that, while we have no control over inspiration or the creative impulse, we must endure the bootcamp of survival, preparing ourselves with craft so when opportunity does come, when the stars align, when the muse whispers, we are able to receive her caress and let it flow through us.
And if the alchemy of all that doesn’t deliver? “You start writing the next one. And after you finish that one, you start on the next. And on and on. And that’s what it is to be a writer, honey.” The cold, hard truth nobody wants to hear. “But...oh, what a way to spend a day...” Oh, and Jonathan did know what he was writing about from Tick on, for sure. Clearly, so does Lin-Manuel Miranda.
I’m so grateful for that scene in the film. What that agent says to Jonathan is everything. Perseverance alone may not ensure success, but giving up guarantees failure. Endurance is the ultimate test of ambition. We all doubt ourselves. It’s human to do so, no matter what you do. Jonathan built a creative life, modest to be sure, but one that allowed him to continue to develop, fail, and grow until story, skill, and an audience ready to listen showed up. When the door finally opened, he walked right through.
