Jupiter Rising

No, I'm not talking about the band with the same name. And Jupiter is not rising, strictly speaking, but turning direct, bringing back good luck and gifts, or so astrologyzone.com would have us believe. I read my horoscope regularly and yesterday, apparently, Jupiter, who's been conspicuously absent from all my areas (home, career, etc.) is coming back. If I am to believe astrologyzone, everything should be turning up Stetco any minute now. Is it sad that, the day before the show, I rely on astrology to get over my breakdown? Absolutely. Is it working? Almost.

This morning I came up with a plan. Two actually. First, I left about 5 messages for Karl at KRVS Radio. If he can come back and check the soundboard I'd feel better about everything. Naturally, that is no guarantee that something nobody has looked at so far, some tiny piece of malicious equipment, won't break down.

My second plan is a drastic change in my opening speech. Initially, I was just going to tell people to turn off their phones and have a good time. Now, I'm going to deliver my last blog entry live, on Saturday night. It won't be a long speech, but it will involve the audience in the process. I'm going to talk about the conditions we have been working in, not as a complaint, but in terms of a site specific performance: the show is shaped by the space it is presented in. So if the space fails, instead of thinking of it as a failure on our part, we'll think of it as some mutation of a guerrilla  theatre show. Warned, included in the process, the public will hopefully not experience it as a disappointment either, but as a natural part of the space the performance takes place in. Theatre in times of war. The show can be interrupted at any moment, but once the danger is over, it can resume without taking a hit. Naturally, I hope nothing will go wrong. But if something does, it will simply be incorporated in the performance. If I learned one thing in 20 years of staging plays, it is to take a misfortune and turn it into an opportunity.

I've been doing a lot of thinking and, no, I won't let these people down because there's too much work that went into this production, too much emotional involvement. And I won't let the audience down either, because they did nothing wrong. Only my ego might get slightly bruised, but that, I hope, I can survive.

So let's hear it for Jupiter and a bit of luck coming our way,  because at this point, all we need is luck. Everything we could control on our end has been taken care of: performances, inflections, rhythm, text, energy. The rest is a matter of luck.

This is my last written blog entry. The last entry will be delivered on the stage, tomorrow, as an opening speech. And if you want to know how things went...well, you'll just have to come to the play, won't you?