That's enough sentiment for one day, Margaret!

Remember that quote? Comes in handy every time I get careless...And I've gotten really careless lately. Too much sentiment.

It's so difficult to be detached, though. You have to be part robot to do it (I'm working on it)...I was watching the cast celebrating Dan's birthday yesterday. That was the thing I couldn't tell him in the car: that the day before I had ordered awesome cupcakes from Sophi P (best cupcakes in town!) with candles and the whole shebang. That everyone in the cast knew and pretended it was a surprise...Could I have still wished him a happy birthday as we went shopping for shoes? Absolutely. But that would have felt like a tiny betrayal since everyone in the cast expected to celebrate him that evening...I can't explain these things: once a theatre collective is created, there is a certain protocol to be followed: either we do things together or not at all.

At the end of the rehearsal today (great rehearsal, by the way), Seth said, "I feel like the rehearsals we had in Griffin took place two years ago." Griffin Hall is the English Department building where we rehearse once a week for about four months before we go on the stage. Yes. The first meetings we had, at the end of August, feel like a lifetime ago. That's how productions are supposed to evolve: slowly, quietly. You begin with a skeleton and, slowly, you add muscles and blood vessels and...things (my knowledge of anatomy ends here). The play takes shape; the shape demands a certain rhythm; actors grow into their characters...All good things to those who wait, no?

So while watching the cast celebrate Dan, I wondered if they knew how rare these moments are: being so utterly part of something; belonging to a group where everyone has your back; working towards that one evening, that one production that reaches two hundred audience members simultaneously. It's a thing of beauty just to think about it.

I'm really trying to keep emotions in check because, to quote from my play, "people and relationships are nothing but traps." But it's getting increasingly difficult not to talk about the way I feel (Guten Abend, Herr Freud...) when I see these extraordinary people baring their souls for me every evening. How exhausting. How admirable. How humbling.

You see what I mean with the sentiment? There comes a point when there's simply too much of it.

Susan brought the pictures she took last night for us to see. They capture some moments in the play (some of them are very very good) but there's something missing. I think we need to have the cast go from scene to scene posing for the camera. There are close ups I need: Larry screaming, Gabe staring at the "Love at first sight" sign, Seth and Dominique's faces during their dance and final embrace, Jean's rare moment of affection...When I watch this play (while pacing maniacally from one end of the house to the other), there are things I see simultaneously, actions that happen in each of the characters' areas and it is this..."chorus" of images that creates the harmony of the whole. When Italo Calvino tried to describe the melodic quality of his chapters he called them "arias." That's how I see the scenes in my play: as separate voices existing in a chorus that unites them while maintaining their distinctive character.

I overexplain, I know. But I have to. I look at the stage and I see my characters, and they have an existence independent of my own, and their world exists only because the relationships between them have allowed for an entire world to be created. At the end of the play the stage is literally littered with "the little things" the lyrics of the opening song refer to: chalk outlines, and pages from a random manuscript, and shoes, and handbags, and rose petals...The tiny facts of life (I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled) have invaded the stage and the characters have to deal with them, carve out an existence among them, learn to love them. A simple play (Conni's kid who's 10, I believe, saw the entire production yesterday and seemed to get it), complicated by its need to stylize human emotions.


To put it more precisely: it has become increasingly difficult for me, at the end of each day, not to go and embrace Dan, and Seth, and Mike, and Conni, and my own kid who's been performing in my plays for 10 years now, not to tell them how much they mean to me, how grateful I am for their portrayal of my characters. There, on the stage, under the chiaroscuro lighting, I recognize my world, my refuge, the only place I feel completely at home. It is a fragile world, dependent entirely on sounds and lights and movement, a world where safety is an illusion, and houses have glass walls. How I love the look of it. How I admire the abandon with which the actors move from one space to the next. Each new space brings the promise of new adventures and each adventure is a little more daring than the last. I don't mean "adventures" in the usual sense. In fact, during many scenes, nothing happens. Nothing on the surface. Internally, the characters wrestle with themselves like Jacob with the angel. Those are the kinds of adventures I'm thinking of: a flight of the imagination, a great passion, an internal exile.


This entire play is a love letter: to my father, to the people in my past, to illusions I've let go of. It's about adventures I no longer dare to have, regrets that surface every day, and gratitude. Mostly gratitude. So, yes, I love you Dan, and Seth and Conni and Mike and Ellie...I love you all, with your faults,and your problems and your tremendous need to make sense of the world. My world makes sense through you, because of you.


That's enough sentiment for one day, Margaret.