I’d never been to New York City.

Peter met me at the airport and said, “Let’s hop on the subway and go downtown.” He could have said, “Let’s take off all our clothes and paddle to Rikers,” though at that point, I didn’t realize Manhattan was an island. I thought that was allegory for a place so complete unto itself that it was suspended in the midst of something other than ordinary dirt. New York City was where magical things happened. Men sported jazz shoes and snapped their fingers constantly. Women wore diamonds to breakfast, and people tried to hustle you. I knew, also, that there was a place called Broadway, but I knew this in the same way that I knew there was a place called Xanadu.

When Peter gave me my first spin around the city, we ended up on Broadway, a street anyone was allowed to walk down without apparent qualifications. It was too much for me to process, and I trailed along, trying not to stare at everything and everyone.

Our performance was the next night, and that one tech rehearsal went until 4 in the morning. The dressing room was a corner of the stage, barely big enough to hold all nine of us. As we sat on the ground of that tiny theater behind the curtain, which was actually a sheet someone had brought from home, Peter kept popping back and saying that the theater was filling up, which was not an impossible feat in a space that small, but still a thrill. With that show we became the Edge Theater company.

To work in the theater in New York City is to be ridiculously lucky, but it comes with pressure. Some nights I crawl home frustrated and shamed in a way that makes my face flush, but I snap out of it, in part maybe because I ended that first performance here with actual egg on my face, put there myself, with abandon and good intentions. I took my first bow in this city standing next to Joe Mantello, pie smeared across our widely grinning mugs. We started our company with the unwavering ambition to create exciting and truthful theater and made our work wherever we could.

Once we appeared at something called “Lunchtime Theater” in Times Square with two homeless people making up half our audience, but we welcomed anyone. Lanford Wilson would tell a story about one night at Caffe Cino. Joe Cino’s tiny Off Off Broadway room gave birth to great theater on an eight-by-eight stage, some nights for whatever meager audience it could gather. One evening a storm waylaid anyone from attending, and there was not one soul in a seat. The actors all stood there in silence, wondering if they should shuffle out and go home, until Joe said, “Do it for the room.” That became the mantra for Joe, and the lucky actors who performed there for no reason other than the joy of it.