One runthrough and four hours of figuring out lights. Discovery: I hate yellow. Yellow makes people look jaundiced and makes the stage look...poor. So Seth and Mike and Dan with occasional help from the rest of us spent a good portion of the time moving a 30 ft ladder about so that Jamie could focus lights and place gels where we needed them.
I had to change the blocking of the nightmare scene and of the ending because we simply don't have enough lights to cover all the areas. And what we have is dying. One of our main lights (one of two side lights, in fact), makes a terrible sound when brought up to full intensity and Jamie said that pretty much spells death: the light is about to shut down. Imagine losing one of your two lateral lights in performance. You can't? Ok, I'll tell you what happens: the entire downstage right area goes dark. All the collective fantasy scenes disappear.
I also rechoreographed the Zeppelin scene because, depending on where you sit in the house, you get to see parts of it or not much...So I changed it again hoping this new setup will solve all our problems.
On tomorrow's agenda:
1.convince Matthew to stop tweaking sound during the performance. When he told me he was muting mics during the runthrough I had a moment of panic. It's very easy to forget that a mic is muted (this has, in fact, happened with Chess' mike one time). I'd like the volumes adjusted once and for all before the rehearsal, and then the mics not touched again. Somehow I need to convince him how serious I am about this.
2.convince myself that I like what we have in terms of lights. I kind of do, but I'm not ecstatic or anything
3. go shopping with Ellie because she needs her white top for the play.
Today I went shopping with Dan for his costume. For all his isolation, Larry has to look cool. Until Dan tried on the fifth pair of pants I didn't realize how skinny he really is. I think I called him "feeble." I'm doing better and better. A week ago I told him he had the stamina of a five year old. Today I called him feeble while assuring him that all the women involved with this production are still crushing on Larry. Perhaps the two statements will balance each other out...
At the end of our six hour rehearsal, after shopping with Dan, we went to hang posters in Griffin. Tomorrow I'll deal with the large poster for Fletcher. While hanging posters I had a pretty weird conversation with Dan. Whenever I'm very tired I don't censor myself: whatever's on my mind, comes out. But Dan answers my questions with a smile and continues to put up with me. I don't know why. I don't know why all these people subject themselves to my merciless approach to directing, to months of work and criticism. It's happened ever since I moved down here. It must be something in the water...
I'm pretty worn out but tomorrow is a relatively easy day: no teaching, just the KRVS interview at 3:30, shopping and rehearsal. At some point the cheap motel that is my house has to return to its original condition. I'm planning a cast party after the show and I can't have people walk into this mess. It's not even messy...it just looks abandoned, as if a thin patina of desolation has attached itself to it.
Also on the agenda tomorrow (and every day until the 20th) is the reminder not to get emotionally attached to the cast. I used to care immensely for the actors I worked with and then one of them killed my play. This happened about four years ago when the production (that one show we had all worked so hard to perfect) got cancelled. I never got over that. The whole thing felt like a personal betrayal. That's why, whenever I catch myself thinking affectionate thoughts about the cast (and it's difficult not to, seeing them get better and better every day), I take a moment to remind myself of that incident and to tell myself that, after the 20th, things will go back to normal as if nothing happened.
But we'll all know that's a lie because something would have happened by then: a play, a moment of colossal abandon and delight, a complete break with reality. And for those few months, in the most artificial environment possible (the rehearsal space, the stage) a world would have been built from the ground up, and all the people in it would have remembered it as their most excellent adventure.
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