Before the Storm

Spent the entire day yesterday working with Susan, my artist/set designer friend, on pieces for the play and for the art show. We did this for The Happiness Machine as well: a month before the play we had an art exhibit with the props and paintings that were going to be part of the set. Because my plays are basically giant art installations, the art shows work as a prologue, an introduction to the look of the play, its mood, its world.

We are going to call this exhibit Silentio. This works on several levels: first, it is part of the title of the production; second, it captures the calm (sshhhhhh....) before the storm, before the two weeks of nightly rehearsals, before the long weekends, before the moment when everything comes together and I find myself, once again, shamelessly in love with my work. I asked Mike the other day: "Is it terrible that, in the end, I'm always so in love with my productions?" He said, no. That's the only way to do it. The only reason to do it.

Playwriting (with the added element of stage direction) is one of those tricky things: on the one hand, the playwright envies the self-sufficiency of the fiction writer and the poet (all they need to complete the work is a quiet room and a desk...perhaps not even that much); on the other hand, the playwright gets to see her work come to life. It's an extraordinary feeling. And, when everything goes well, there's nothing in the world like it. True, my work begins when the work of the poet is done. My work begins when the text of the play is completed. But it's worth it every time, although every time I start a new production I doubt my sanity.

The Silentio Project is a play that makes me reevaluate everything, I'm not exactly sure why. It's a healing process, although I'm beginning to suspect it won't be without sacrifice. I have a terribly nostalgic feeling about the whole thing, as I let go and forge ahead...I've no idea where I'll stand (emotionally) on November 19 when the play opens. This (this kind of impact) has happened before, but not to me. At the end of Barbarian at the Gates, a couple who had been dating for a while decided to get married in a hurry. I remember the girl telling me: "When the play ended we both felt damaged, somehow. We needed to be together, we needed to make huge decisions. We realized we didn't have all the time in the world." Perhaps she didn't say "damaged," but that was the idea. Emotionally, they felt they had reached an impasse (the end of the affair, the beginning of the marriage...Why does the latter always imply the former?) At the end of The Dick Traces (my response to The Vagina Monologues), a man put a letter in my hand. He had written it during the intermission, pages and pages of small, handwritten text. "How did you know? How did you know how it felt? How it feels? How did you manage to put everything in a play, to show the world such raw emotion?" I still have the letter somewhere. At the end of The Happiness Machine, two relationships ended and a new one formed, a happy encounter that I still take complete responsibility for...Now it's my turn, I guess. I don't know how things will end, but when the lights fade over The Silentio Project, the world (my world) will have gone through a massive change.

I once wrote a short piece called The Science of Internal Collapse. The Silentio Project is the opposite of that: it's the science of internal healing, a way to deal with terrifying changes, a way to rediscover sanity. And yet, for the most part, this play is a comedy...Must be the 30 years I spent in a communist country: you learn how to laugh in the face of misery, you learn that the only way to deal with sadness is to laugh.

So here we are, in the days of wine and roses, working on small projects to be incorporated into the larger one, a work of massive reconstruction, a scaffolding of sorts meant to sustain the workings of one's soul. Wish me luck, my friends. Luck and patience and tenacity. I am both afraid of, and curious about the future. I once asked my lit class, "What happens when we close the pages of a book? What happens to the characters trapped inside? Do their stories continue, quietly, outside our grasp? Do we put an end to their encounter? Do we matter to them as much as they matter to us?" The class looked at me questioningly. I didn't get an answer... "We read to know we're not alone," said C.S. Lewis. But why on earth do we go to the theatre? And what will happen in the silence following the final applause?