Meditation Room

First run-through yesterday, first day for Chun, our new sound guy. Things are looking good, a little too good for comfort. I don't look for problems, but I don't like it when there are none so early in the game. I remember a similarly smooth run for Barbarian at the Gates, I remember feeling odd about it, wondering when things were going to go wrong, and then two days before the show our soundboard shut down completely. The entire thing shorted out.  Had this happened during the show, we would have had to end there -- there was nothing we could have done. But it happened before the opening night so we fixed it and, at the premiere, I spent the entire time praying nothing else would go wrong. True, Derek fractured his heels during the opening scene, but then carried on, on an adrenaline high, as if nothing had happened. Not even I knew anything was wrong until after the show. I did notice he had changed some of the choreographed steps in a particular scene, so as the public was leaving I asked him about it, and that's when he told me. He had to use a cane for weeks after the show...Good times.

There are many small transitions in The Silentio Project that I'm not sure about. There's a particular scene I find difficult to stage, a war scenario the emotives have to enact. The first part consists of all the Hollywood war cliches, with people rolling around shouting things like "Don't die on me now!" and "I'm not going to die in this hellhole!" but then the second part becomes serious as the emotives forget this is only a scenario meant to drain them of emotion. They believe in the reality of the scene, the music changes, the movements slow down...This transition is very difficult to stage. We either have to have only one soundtrack that changes from silly to serious, in which case the silly part has to be timed to the second, or we have a fade in the middle of the scene with a pause between soundtracks which makes things pretty awkward...I don't know yet what to do. The thing is, once we're on the stage, answers somehow present themselves, but we're still two weeks away from rehearsals on the stage and I need to find a solution now.

At this point I work mostly on the emotives who, with the constant change of scenarios, need to be both consistent (the way, underneath it all, an actor still retains an identifiable personality, a certain manner of speaking, certain voice inflections, etc.) and completely different, depending on the characters they play for I.N.S.E.C.T's experiments.

In parallel with the story of the two emotives (played by Dan and Ellie), there's a love story developing between one of I.N.S.E.C.T's personnel, Cordelia Stark (played by Conni) and her android helper (played by Mike). It's both comic ("I can't trust men," Cordelia says at some point, "I can't even trust machines shaped like men!") and tragic, but it's very important for that argument about solitude I want to make. How lonely must Cordelia be to fall for her own creation, to expect the "machine" to reciprocate her feelings, to lose her job in order to save her imaginary romance? But then again, aren't all the people we fall for partly our creations? How much reality is there in our perception of those close to us? In a way, we all live in large, invisible laboratories, toiling away at this or that image which, once completed, we cherish as real...Who truly knows anybody's thoughts, anyway?

There is something about The Silentio Project that makes me want to reevaluate everything about the small world that surrounds me. This triggers contradictory emotions: a slight sadness at the thought of possible misreadings, but also an intense feeling of accomplishment...of serenity. At the end of the day (at the end of the play?), I know exactly who I am, what I want, what I'm capable of. Are my readings of people imaginary? Have I invented relationships, like Cordelia? Perhaps. But unlike her, and unlike the emotives whose goal is so narrow (escape) that, once they accomplish it, they're incapable of further action, I can see clearly ahead of me. The internal exile (inside our personalized laboratories) is only tragic if our image of ourselves is also an invention. That, I believe, is the mistake everybody makes in Silentio: the characters depend on other beings to complete their fantasies, to make it from one day to the next. At their core, however, they don't know who they are and what they can accomplish alone.

Silentio is a much more physical play than The Happiness Machine, and yet, because of all the things I've just talked about, it needs to be...I don't know. Mellifluous. Serene. I have to figure out the rhythm, but I think it's the rhythm of those as yet unsolved transitions that will shape the piece, not the rhythm of the actual scenes. At the end, the public has to understand both the tragedy (we depend on other people to build an image of ourselves) and the (happy? serene?) silence that follows such a discovery. I have to find that rhythm in the silence that slowly builds inside me. Ssshhhhhhhh....