Have you ever seen something that just… makes you better? Because it takes everything you know and everything you feel and just flips it upside down, and hands your knowings and feelings back to you with a big sign stamped across them that says “You are wrong” and you can’t help but realize that they are right.

I saw something that made me better. BYU’s latest theatrical project, which can’t be named for copyright’s sake just… made me better. Because now I know that I am wrong about my feeling that things couldn’t be worse than they already are.

For those of you who did not see BYU’s unnamed production, let me explain to you why you should have. First of all, the actors not just crept, and not just danced, but positively burrowed into your heart and twisted their ways into all the crevices until it bled. This doesn’t sound pleasant, and truth be told, it wasn’t really, but it reminded me how to feel again. To feel so hard you bleed. And something about that was comforting.

Secondly, the tiny black box of the theater mutated before your very eyes into a drab dance hall without the use of any props or set. For two meaningful hours the world transformed and absorbed into a disgusting world of entertainment, manipulated by masks and drama. For two short but oh-so-long hours everything was horrible and beautiful, black and bare yet elaborate and decadent considering you were all the way back in the 1930’s.

And third of all, the balmy realization that things can always be worse. They can always be worse to the point where “living ain’t the prize anymore.” Things can be so bad that you have to beg someone else to kill you because you just don’t have the courage. Things can always be worse.

It’s pieces like that that make you realize that you have it good and you were wrong to think otherwise.