Inventory

Whenever I get to this point –about a month and a half before the opening (and closing) night – I take inventory. A catalog of sorts, this list is very similar to people’s New Year resolutions (which is appropriate considering that my “year” begins and ends with each production; that I keep time according to our rehearsal schedule: one evening a week –  a two hour rehearsal, casual, less taxing than a class; then the occasional 6 hour Saturday rehearsal, a little more intense, more focused; then, two weeks before the show, rehearsals every evening and all weekend, 10am to 8pm, performance boot camp, really, just a little bit classier).

Unlike a list of New Year’s resolutions, however, my inventory consists solely of flashbacks (no flashforwards here). Unlike the people who make lists at the beginning of each year, I am less prone to delusions.

These are the things I’ve learned over the past few months, a list of facts in no particular order, accomplishments, losses, victories and disappointments, in other words, History: the history of this production, its genesis, its paratext. (When did I start work on this play? July? By “work” I mean the moment I started thinking about it, writing lines in my head while doing dishes, letting – slowly, slowly – Night’s image materialize, seeing the space around him, then the cast of characters necessary for his survival. So: July? Probably much earlier, perhaps two years ago when K. walked into my classroom, of all the classrooms in all the world…There’s no such thing as a coincidence. Dickens invented coincidences to advance his plots and we’re just too damn well-read, that’s all).

The inventory*:

-I will never learn: I will do plays when I have something to say, when there’s something new I want to try – a genre-bending twist, a different kind of character, a new method of work. I will never learn, and I will not care that six months of work equal zero on my end-of-year performance evaluation, because a production is not a written text (not a publication), because it can’t be quantified, because “everyone can do theatre, it’s just that easy”** so it can’t require that much effort.  But a production is a living, breathing thing that keeps me living and breathing, so I will never learn.

-I am in danger of losing touch with reality. I’m not talking about the method actor’s trance here, but a different kind of reality, my internal reality that changes with every play I do. Some people are afraid of death. Oh, let’s stop hiding: I am terrified of death, not the process itself but its consequences, my complete erasure from existence, and even more devastatingly, from other people’s memories: people I befriended, people I loved, people who loved me, people who will mourn my absence for a while (but not too long because time heals everything). Because of my irrational fear of inconsequence, I feel completely alive only when I make up a world whose evolution, whose path I can control utterly. When I do a play, I live differently, I think differently, I feel about two decades younger, my internal landscape changes. Then the play is over and I become dormant…older. This is both a gift and a curse. The gift: I think differently. The curse: I cannot explain this to the people I work with closely, the fact that, internally, I see no difference between us, not in age, not in experience, not in cultural background. So I behave differently (perhaps shockingly) because every play is a great leveler of things, because the immense expanse of open, empty space it creates (very similar to the desert) becomes the stage we work on, the place where we meet on equal terms, the consequential playground. How can I ever explain this coherently? Sally Potter does it at the end of The Tango Lesson when she dances with Pablo (her actor, her tango teacher, her lover) in the final scene, and sings, “You are me and I am you/One is one and one are two.” This is what I mean. This is what I can’t explain. This is how I lose touch with real reality. This is what keeps me alive for a while.

And

-I am afraid that, one day, I might be too old for this. How will I know? When the internal landscape (my age) will refuse to change; when I will cross paths with people and see them exactly as they are, and not as what they might become under the spotlight; when I will no longer hear random lines in my head while doing dishes. When I will no longer fall for the Steppenwolf. When I will no longer care.

For now…For now all these things are still happening. The play is the perfect storm. And the storm takes my breath away every single time.

__________________________________________________________________________

* So it appears I lied: this particular inventory is not just a collection of facts about this play, but an inventory of inventories, because this play makes me more nostalgic than I’ve ever been, because it infects me with sentiment, because I find it so confounding. An inventory of inventories then. So be it.

**One day I will punch in the face the next person who proclaims this in a meeting, smiling benignly, with that righteous, self-assured conviction that only imbeciles are capable of.