Help Us Bring "charlie's play" to NYC!

My name is Tommy Vines. I am an actor, playwright, movement artist, and theatre artist based in Boston and New York City. I am a current Senior BFA Theatre Arts Performance major at BU. I am also Charlie Foster’s good friend. I wrote a play called i love you and i always will or charlie’s play as a memorial for Charlie who passed away from terminal cancer. And I need your help to bring this piece to NYC in July 2024.

After losing Charlie, I became fixated on this fear that I would forget Charlie, eventually. Because time is a horrible and bitter and fickle thing, and if I have the fortune of living to 90 or 95 or even longer, what is to say that I am going to remember Charlie’s smile, or our memories, or our favorite times together, or the smell of their hair, or the hallways we hung out in, or the countless secrets we shared, or the music we loved, or any of it? What’s to say I would remember any of it?

That fear was blinding. In my grief, I began to create a collection of memories. I found every piece of writing I wrote about Charlie and for Charlie and I put it in a document. I scoured my camera roll and made multiple copies of every photo I had of them. I went through notebooks and found poem after poem about our time together. I swiped through my Instagram accounts and their Instagram accounts, and I saved as much as I could, lest the internet take a fraction of them from me. I went through their Spotify and converted their playlists to Apple Music so I could have them. I began learning ASL. I could not stop. And then, in this same document that was holding all of this writing, all of these memories, I began writing down everything I could remember. So I would not forget. No forgetting. No forgetting. No forgetting.

This document became this massive, living, and breathing thing. I began to weave these collected pieces together in a tapestry to tell Charlie’s story through my eyes, as I saw it. To remember them, to truly remember them. To let them live again and again and again through this work. To give them this memorial, the “I love you” that I will always need to give them, over and over and over again. To make them stone, to make them immortal, to cheat death and cheat time’s brutal game of forgetting. To make Charlie immortal in my mind, to make these things whole and stone in my heart.

Thus, i love you and i always will or charlie’s play, a memorial play by Tommy Vines was born.

Exploring life, love, loss, and grief through poetry, movement, multimedia expression, and song, my creative design team (Maddi Riddick-Seals, Katelyn Thompson, Lena Broach and Irene Wang) and the devising ensemble cast (Emma Weller, Trev Turnbow, Jojo, and Nicolas Zuluaga) came together in partnership with me to give Charlie the best “I love you” that I know how to give.

In September 2023, we premiered this memorial play at the Joan & Edgar Booth Theater and Boston University to 2 sold out performances. It was a labor of love and an immense undertaking for all of us, and a wonderful success on countless levels. To honor Charlie at The Booth in my final year of college has been one of my greatest achievements as a human being and as an artist. From this initial presentation, we got an incredible offer to tell this story AGAIN in NYC, which is Charlie’s and my hometown. In partnership with the YMCA, we will be taking i love you and i always will or charlie’s play to an Off-Broadway theater called the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater on 64th Street at the end of July. To make this happen, we need to raise $6,500. Can you help us tell this story?