The 2,700-seat proscenium stage at the Phillips Center’s Walt Disney Theater is beautiful and strangely intimate for its size, but vastly different from our Broadway theater in the round (seating 775 at most). At Circle, the audience is at most 10 rows back. In Orlando, there were three balconies, the top of which seemed a football field away.

There is a magic in performance that alters seeming immutables like time and distance. But magic takes work. The director, Sam Gold, had rows added to bring the seats as near the lip of the stage as possible and brought our mikes closer to meet them. We found we had to slightly slow the tempos of songs and the pace of scenes. At Circle, the play exists on a very nimble and subtle human scale where the smallest nuance registers immediately. In a huge hall, it takes the audience longer to hear and respond.

Our company instinctively adjusted its performances. The sound department made sure that every nuance of the cast and the band was heard. But what made the night unforgettable wasn’t the technical achievements on or offstage. It was the bond that formed between the audience and our company.

Our writer, Lisa Kron, introduced us, saying, “The first thing I would like to say, on behalf of all of us, is we’re so sorry.” There was silence, and then voices called from the darkened seats: “Thank you. Thank you.” In that moment, we were back in our intimate “Fun Home,” closer than ever to the heart of this audience. Comic moments played more joyfully than ever. Scenes in a funeral home — a place too many in this community had recently, prematurely visited — became a chance to find a moment’s shared relief in gentle laughter with neighbors at the painful absurdities of life.

But it was the latter scenes of a father and daughter’s last car ride together, a wife’s lament and a man’s anguished, sudden end that I will never forget. They were met by a deafening silence from an audience holding its breath. And then Beth Malone as Alison delivered the line “Bracing yourself against the pulse of the trucks rushing past.” I had forgotten that line was coming. Innocuous, a simple descriptive word, but in this night’s context, it rang out like a shot.

We sat motionless onstage, weeping. Not for ourselves, but for what had happened here, for what this community had brought in their hearts tonight. And then came an ovation that was a roar, a catharsis and a celebration of love and life. We bow to standing ovations after every performance. There has never been one we will cherish more.

An audience member in New York once described our play as providing “a place where you can bring your grief.” Certainly, that was what we hoped to offer the people of Orlando. And the hope that when they picked up their burdens again, they would be lighter carrying them back into the dark night.

In murky, frightening times like these, that is the most essential thing theater offers an audience: a brief community, connecting us to one another in larger, lasting ways. And stories that say different things to us, depending on the time and what we need to hear, as a way to make the darkness outside our circle seem penetrable. That is the same for every audience, no matter how different.