While working as an arts reporter for Bloomberg News, I met Caroline Prugh in March 2006 at the now-defunct Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky. She was there on behalf of the revered producer and general manager Stuart Thompson. Just 32, Caroline seemed to know everything about theater, commercial and nonprofit, past and present.
Keenly insightful and quick to laugh, Caroline later left the safety of Stuart Thompson’s office to go to graduate school and become a playwright. During the pandemic, she created interactive video dramas with her close friend David Carpenter.
Caroline died May 13 at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center at 50. (She’d been diagnosed as a child with Marfan syndrome, a disorder of the connective tissue that impacts the heart.) At her memorial service at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Park Slope, David spoke about the role of friendship and faith in their lives and careers.
My life with Caroline was so much about theatre from beginning, middle and end. We both believed in the transformative power of the stage.
Everyone knew Caroline had a strong and abiding faith in God. Yet, in the 20-plus years of friendship, she and I never once discussed religion. But of everyone I have met during my travels on this earth, I learned the most about the meaning of faith from her.
We met sometime in 2003. A mutual director friend introduced us and thought we might get along. She had a fabulous job working for a high-powered Broadway general manager. I was a lowly assistant with big plans and we just fell in love as friends. We shared a deep and abiding passion, love, frustration and obsession with theatre.
A couple of years later, I got my very first opportunity to be a producer with a show at the New York Musical Theatre Festival. I remember calling her and saying, “Hey you work at a GM office, be my GM for this show.” And she said yes. It went as well as you could imagine for a couple of kids for their first time at the rodeo.
I still tell the story of the cast revolt against me for a mistake only a young producer can make. And while I sat on one side of the room where they said horrible things about me to my face, she sat firmly by my side. The next day, my then boyfriend, Jacob, came by and handed out cheese burgers to the angry company all wearing an “I Heart David” t-shirt.
It was a total disaster and we got a rave in the New York Times. After it was over, she said, “I don’t want to be a GM. That was fun but this isn’t what I am meant to do. But you should be a producer, this is your calling. Oh and that boyfriend of yours, hang on to him.”
Our relationship grew. Theatre was always at the center of everything for us. What was happening in the business? Who was doing what where?
She helped me get a job at DreamWorks on a big show her office was GM’ing. I wrote one of her recommendation letters to grad school at Columbia. In 2010, she officiated the wedding where I married that boy in the ‘I Heart David’ t-shirt. And that was the first lesson I had in her faith. She saw something in us from the beginning. And when I told her that we were going to get married, she told me she was officiating the wedding and that was the end of that conversation.
Her belief in us was so strong that she wanted to bind it with and for us. That, no matter what, she would be woven into our relationship in her way.
The next ten years were tough on both of us at different times. I found myself in a a toxic and challenging job, while she thrived at grad school and teaching. I produced a showcase of one of her shows. We talked. A lot. Most weekends, I would call her or she would call me and we would go over everything that we were doing, learning, failing and succeeding at. One of the consistent subjects that we talked about was always, what was the idea? What was thing thing that was going to define me/us, to set us apart.
You need to have an idea that no one else has. We were always hunting for it.
We celebrated her 40th birthday together with her friends and family at Sardi’s. She told me later that when she was a child, her doctors told her she would never make it to her 40th, so everyday from now on was a gift.
The latter half of the decade, our fortunes changed. I got out of my terrible job and finally had my own company, while she experienced brutal medical setbacks. After surviving two open heart surgeries and a stroke, she continued to live each day with an unparalleled positivity, determination and humor and never allowed us to put her on the pedestal she had so earned. I never knew how she did it.
For all of us and especially those who worked in live entertainment, the pandemic changed everything. And it’s in those times that ideas are born. When everything shut down, I stared at the wall for three days and then I walked downstairs to my husband and said, “We have two assets to our name, this house and my interactive software. We’re gonna start entertaining people at home.”
I called Caroline and said, “help me write interactive live stories.” And once again when I needed her most, she said yes. Once again, she was by my side as we started something entirely new.
Thomas Aquinas wrote that faith is “an act of the intellect assenting to the truth at the command of the will.” During the pandemic by our sheer force of will, we created our big idea. Almost exactly four years later from that phone call, our much-evolved idea started rehearsals with Dungeons & Dragons The Twenty-Sided Tavern this past March, now running off-Broadway. In those four years of the most difficult, hardest, scariest times of my life she never let me give up. And whenever she thought I needed it, which was a lot, she would tell me that she believed so strongly and knew I could do this.
She would have known I was going to work the title of the show into her eulogy. And she would have approved.
As her wife, Paige van den Burg, told me, the last few days of her life were some of the happiest. It was a culmination of a life’s work spent building relationships amongst a group of people she believed in. As we gathered, there were faces put to names, new relationships created and many, many stories shared about Caroline. The common thread was her belief and love for each and every person who was there for her, in person, on face-time and in prayer. There all these threads she had so carefully pulled over 50 years were finally woven into the tapestry that was her life for her to see.
Faith, finally, is a firm belief in something in which there is no proof. In my unrelenting drive, I am guilty of taking everyone around me for granted. What I didn’t realize until we were nearing the end was that for 20 years, Caroline has been my faith. She was there for me whenever I needed her, answered the call whenever it came and most important, she believed in me since I didn’t believe in myself. She understood the true meaning and purpose of what faith is, and never once tried to explain it to me. She simply lived it and knew one day I would accept it.
There were eight of us around her bedside when she passed away. She was at a divine place of peace and acceptance. Through all the hardship she endured in her life, she truly lived each day with purpose and definition of her own faith. Memory is a tricky thing, but as I will always remember it, as she looked into her beautiful wife’s eyes, her last words were “I love you.”
Her faith was an enduring and unshakeable love for everyone in her life. It’s what she gave to each of us on a daily basis and what she has left us with. Her love for me, for Paige, her family and her friends is something that will never go away. It will live on in the way she has impacted our lives and made us who we are. And for me, it will be part of everything I have ever done and the work that is yet to come. Because she never needed proof that any of us could be the best versions of ourselves and do the best work. She simply believed.
