I have always enjoyed watching each of the various cycles that are a part of what I do. I love the beginnings of a project when it's all mapped out, but with only a little specific detail added. I love the hard work that is a process of constantly finding problems and solving them, and then solving them once more to make things work just a little better. I like endings. I like the doing of everything as fully and as beautifully as it can be done, because my work is ephemera, and will be held only in our memories. I like that too.
Last week we began the cycle of opening each play. Seeing its first time on the finished set, adding lights, sound, costumes, and finally, an audience. It's an odd three weeks. Long days and nights in the theatre, meals at unusual times, wearing warm clothes to survive the arctic air conditioning needed to counter the heat from the lights. But it is also invariably taking a show that has been rehearsed, a kind of intricate structure of words, pictures, ideas and actions that all sort of work on their own– and breathing life into it. The technical elements help, the actor's internal clocks are about to launch them into show energy, and the director starts running out of suggestions and starts repeating over and over that "what this show needs is an audience!" I'm not sure how, but a heart starts to beat within the production, and it takes on the life it will share with whoever comes to meet it. I'm not as sure that it's a time I love. It makes me focus on the world in the dark of the theatre so intensely that the milk spoils, the bird feeder hangs empty, the fuel light stays on... but I am intensely interested in what is happening in that pool of light onstage, which leads me from one call to the next, right on till opening night and that crowd of expectant patrons. It doesn't always work, but trying to make it so it is the most serious play I ever do. When it does work, the result is remarkable for the performers and audience alike, and the effort to get there... inconsequential.
Today I have a call at 10AM and we'll run the show. After the run, we'll work any trouble spots. We'll break for lunch at 1:30 and resume work at 3. This will be our first time on the set, which brings a new list of problems and delights. We'll run the show and work on problems until 6:30. Then the actors will go home for some hard-earned rest and I'll go to a "paper tech" which gives the tech areas line-by-line timing for their work. Tuesday we'll run at 11, break from 4 to 6, run at 6:30 and break at 11. Wednesday will be the same, except for small preview audience at 7:30. It's a kind of twilight zone from which I will emerge on Thursday at 7:30, dressed up, and ready to share what we've made together, and then party. With luck I'll stay home on Friday and buy some milk and gas before we begin again on Saturday with tech for Unnecessary Farce.
Wish me luck!
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