Feel it out/split the difference
I started rehearsals for a new play this week
We’re two nights in, and Courtney is stage managing, which is to say she’s stage managing her first show ever.
When I came home from our first rehearsal I tossed my bag of bones (my body) on the couch next to Larry and recounted every detail, then worried that Courtney was regretting her choice—her executive fantasy about wearing a headset backstage, briskly calling out “Ten minutes til house!”, booking our director with dinner plans and cars waiting out front, dashed by the grim reality of weeknight evenings spent sitting on a folding chair in a cement warehouse where the door alarm sounds a midi Ave Maria and neighborhood geese gather to fight on the roof at 7:45pm sharp. The reality of using my thermal mug of water from home as the wine bottle in scene 1 and the cup of instant coffee in scene 5, the way the only way to learn the turns and beats of every scene is to do it again and again and again, on a school night. The cast repeats the scene, together.
But also. . . after we figure out where to sit, when to stand, when to pick at the edge of the imaginary fraying tablecloth, someone points out that this line here echoes another line in an earlier scene, that maybe this is where the character decided to blow up her life or that he didn’t want to drown himself in the ocean or that they’d stay up all night comparing their worst fears with someone who was not their spouse. We try shit, experiment. Yell or stand closer or wrench our faces away. Feel it out, split the difference. Moments start to feel real despite the mechanical pencil in one hand and the script just out of frame. Ave Maria plunks along as an underscore. Slowly, slowly, even this early, something begins to emerge.
Good things:
I’m so happy for my very close friend Jenny Slate.
NEW TERRACE HOUSE IS ON NETFLIX!
The days are getting shorter and that’s Bad, but when I opened the curtains at my usual time this morning, the sky was lavender and bright, sunrise still ringing.
I love you,
Lindsey