Confessions

There comes a moment in the evolution of every play when we crash. Everything we worked on collapses. The actors are unsure of their movements, the sound man is overwhelmed, I feel like a giant failure, ask myself the same questions: what if this is the play that doesn't come together? What if this fragmentation that I see (imposed by the fractured rhythm of the scenes) is as good as it gets? What if the previous play was the best I can do? What if this is the end of the affair between me and the stage?

My sincere congratulations to people who can stage a play with complete disregard for details. Long live the non-perfectionists, the easy-goers, the "we'll get this play done in two weeks" boasters! Good for them! Live and let live. I, for one, can't get over the details, the one second delay in sound, the minimal increase in volume, the one hesitant gesture. I told the cast last night "If I want you to be merely good, you'll end up being mediocre. If I want you to be spectacular, you'll end up being very good" -- or something to that effect. I yelled a lot, not at someone in particular, but out of fear and frustration. I can't explain what happens when I watch a scene that unfolds perfectly and then there's THAT ONE THING that spoils it. It can be anything: a wrong move, two beats of silence instead of one, the wrong inflection in the voice, a missed sound cue. Whatever it is, it destroyes everything that preceded it.

Two weeks ago I was complaining: "This play is going too well, I need it to crash or it will crash on opening night." Now it's crashed and I'm sitting here wishing for a Humpty-Dumpty miracle, wanting it whole again, unfractured, beautiful.

I miss Rita terribly. In moments such as these (apparently I experience them with every production but have no memory of the fact at the end), she would always tell me "The play will be beautiful. I know it," and, somehow, that's all it would take to make me feel good about everything again. But Rita isn't here and the substitutes (I actually asked people to tell me, at regular intervals, "The play will be beautiful") don't work.

I am so afraid (as I was with The Happiness Machine) that realism is truly not my field, that the honest exchange between the characters, devoid of the usual hyperstylized quality of my previous plays, will appear somehow artificial, embarrassing, poor. Yes, poor -- as in lacking awe, a certain spectacular element. I don't know. I'm thinking of cutting the soundtrack that accompanies the only killing in the play. I want to let the actors perform the scene without any help from sound, the way this would happen in reality. But fights, killings, look clumsy in reality. (I've seen fights, never killings, but I imagine that taking a life requires effort, takes a long time, exhausts both victim and killer). Should I show the effort, the clumsiness, the truly pathetic nature of violence? I don't know. To quote Cordelia Stark (who is, in turn, quoting lines from The Maltese Falcon), "It's not always easy to know what to do."

I don't know what to do. I got my crash and now I'm contemplating it in all its splendor. "Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall..."

I think I was so focused on healing myself with this play, of saying everything I needed to say in order to be able to move on, that I ended up writing a script for a movie. All the transitions I'm frustrated about would happen effortlessly in a film: the volume of the music in the background, the actors' whispering voices, the slow, deliberate gestures, the humanizing close-ups. I wrote a bloody movie and I'm trying to stage it as a play and it's not coming together.

But as I say that, I hear this persistent, little voice that tells me this always, always happens; that things always come together in the end; that all I need is patience and trust. And these extraordinary people I abuse every evening making them repeat a scene until they want to run screaming, do trust me. How do they perceive my meltdowns? As genuine crises or pathetic moments of hysteria?

I want to love this play again. I don't love it now, as I type this. And I want it to love me back. I want a love fest all around, and then I want to feel the rhythm of this crazy tale take over the stage, reach out, and break people's hearts. I want the last image to stay with them forever, as a reminder of what we can become when we're drained of emotions, as a reminder of what theatre can be when it escapes its own, tyrannical, rules. I want all of that, and then I want to feel the happiness I always feel at the end of each production. And then I want to sleep.