It is difficult and also perhaps especially important, in the midst of so much suffering and loss to remind ourselves of how each particular loss is unique. We must pause to memorialize them.

Just as the pandemic erupted, Target Margin Theater suffered a terrible loss. On March 9, Doug Langworthy took his own life. Even in this tornado of stress and change, flux and pressure we are all sharing, we insist on stopping to celebrate a glorious human being, and to grieve his passing.

A PERSONAL STATEMENT

Some of us knew him intimately, and if you did not know him personally, you know him through our company’s productions.

Doug was a hugely important friend and collaborator to me and for TMT — a foundational member of our company. We met on that ur-TMT production Spring Awakening at Yale College in 1990, featuring Rinne Groff among others (no, Doug and I were not undergraduates then!). Doug worked on everything we did in the 90s as a dramaturg, and especially amazing German plays, which he often translated. I directed his translation of The Prince of Homburg, at the old Cocteau Rep also in 90, and then of course Hans Henny Jahnn’s Medea and Penthesilea in HERE’s first season (in which Doug also performed!). But we worked on everything, everything together for years: from Egypt and Little Eyolf to Mother Courage to The Sandman. Doug’s translation of Goethe’s Faust was our last big collaboration, and perhaps his most important work as a writer; we worked on it for years, the first of the marathon Target Margin projects. Doug was also one of the original get-drunk-at-the-party-and-stay-up-all-night TMT-ers; he famously curled up to sleep in a fireplace one time, and another time had Emma Griffin give him an impromptu drunken haircut — not a good idea. We did a lot together.

Doug had bipolar disorder and had managed it successfully for decades. He was incredibly high functioning, and held major dramaturgical/literary positions in American regional theater, at OSF, The McCarter, and for the last many years as Literary Director at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. He had recently changed his medication, which had been damaging his kidneys, and unfortunately the new treatment was not successful. If you have experienced the devastation of mental illness personally or, as I have, in those we love, I hope you will agree that speaking about this and awakening our culture to it is urgent. Mental illness is illness. Sufferers must be supported with generous compassion free of judgment and stigma.

Our work at Target Margin and the field of serious theater everywhere are poorer for his loss. Me, I am already lonely for Doug. Where is my friend, my partner to read and think deeply with about dramatic literature, in German or any language at all? Silence.

— David

A SAMPLE OF DOUG’S WORK

Doug’s work was beautiful and always inspiring to me. This is his translation of Goethe’s dedicatory poem at the beginning of Faust:

Once more you draw near me, flickering shapes,
Who drew my weary gaze so long ago.
This time shall I try to hold you close?
Is my heart attracted to these mad visions?
You’re crowding in! All right, take charge,
Come out of this fog, envelop me;
Youthful feelings quicken in my breast
Roused by the magic breezes in your wake.
You bring back memories of happier days;
Many beloved ghosts rise up again
Like in an old and half-forgotten myth,
First love and friendship rising with it;
The pain feels fresh, repeating the lament
Of the twisted labyrinth of life,
Telling of the friends who now are gone
Cheated by fortune of their brightest hours.
They won’t hear the ending of this song,
The eager souls who were the first to hear it,
Those friends of mine have now been pushed aside,
Their first reactions vanished with them.
My song will now be heard by strangers’ ears—
Eager for their praise, my heart grows timid;
And those who once took pleasure in my song,
If still alive, are scattered far and wide.
A long-forgotten yearning overcomes me
For that solemn, silent spirit realm,
Like from a harp, my whispered tones
Begin to sound again uncertainly,
A shudder seizes me, tears follow tears,
My hardened heart feels soft and mild once more;
All that I have recedes into the distance,
And what I’ve lost becomes reality.