As Boneyard Prayer draws to a close and I take time to reflect on the process, there is one thing that is abundantly clear to me: I will not miss the dirt. Though this romp through the soil has in fact allowed me to reenact childhood pastimes of digging holes in the back yard (a by no means unenjoyable occupation), I very much look forward to going out on a Saturday night without grit under my fingernails and mysterious smudges on my skin. I think I can speak for everyone (the stage and house management teams included), when I say that while admiring greatly what the dirt has does for the show, we won’t mind giving it up for a weekend’s cleanliness.

But when I ask myself what I will miss from this four month journey, the answer is much more personal, and the image that immediately pops into my mind is a pair of glass puppet eyes. These eyes belong to a puppet that shares my name, Alice, and when she is pulled from her box for her first entrance of the show, those eyes meet mine for a moment. It brings a lump to my throat every time.

The expression of an inanimate wooden puppet was something entirely foreign to me at the beginning of this process, but now I have found that these objects can speak to beauty and pain with an honesty few living beings can achieve onstage. When I carry Alice out for her final scene, my heart is filled with a gentleness and sadness equal to what I would feel for a living thing. When I offer yet another bottle to the liquor soaked Martin puppet I can feel the rage in his heaving wooden frame. And when the curtain closes and Martin is at rest, I let my cheek fall to his papier mache side and share in the moment of peace.

I will miss the puppets. I will miss the people who have moved them with me. I will miss all the others who have help create the world in which they live. It is a dark, difficult, and yes, very dirty world, but after I’ve washed away the dirt, its beauty and honesty will stay with me.

-Alice Wedoff, Gravedigger