THE REGISTRY opens (and closes) in ten days. I worry
about everything: not having rehearsed for six weeks, having three days to put it
all together with a cast who’s never done this before; planning two-three
rehearsals on every one of those three days (including a morning rehearsal on
the day of the show). Will that exhaust everyone or create a good working
rhythm? I have no idea. Our last two rehearsals, mid-November, were complete
opposites: a great, upbeat, spectacular rehearsal followed, on the next day, by
a tepid one presented before a trial audience of two.
I can’t lie: I’m tired. This year has exhausted me. I
say, “This is the last play for a while, perhaps for good.” My friends laugh,
say “yeah, yeah,” and point out I’ve said this before. I have, but out of
frustration not exhaustion, and always before changing direction. I used to
think four projects ahead; I used to have stories that had to be told; I used
to try not to write lines for the new play while working on the current one.
Not anymore. I’ve got nothing. No stories line up waiting to be told after THE
REGISTRY. Beyond this production lies a silence I haven’t experienced before,
deafening in its finality.
Things have changed. The world has changed, but so did
my immediate landscape. I have no access to performing venues other than
completely reinventing large auditoriums on campus. I did that in May, for Revision. It was great, but I don’t plan
to do it again. Tech crews I trust are hard to find. People I trust enough to
work with are scarce. I often wonder what it would be like to have nothing to
worry about but the actual play, to have everything at my disposal and the
money to pay for it. I guess I’ll never know.
For now, once THE REGISTRY closes its gates, I’m
taking a break from theatre. It’s a beautiful, but treacherous field and we
(theatre and I) need a trial separation.
I want THE REGISTRY to be perfect. Not in that loud,
declamatory way that often kills the spirit of a play, but in a way that
connects its subject (love, bureaucracy) with every single member of the audience.
I want the questions posed by THE REGISTRY to haunt people long after they
leave the theatre. A character in THE REGISTRY, whose employment file is
classified in its entirety because she might be God, asks: “What is the story
you’re trying to tell?” It’s the most important question of the play: identity
as narrative; identity defined by narrative. We all have stories to tell. “We’re
all stories after all.”
During the opening of THE REGISTRY art exhibit, a
couple noticed the line written on the sails of a large ship, and read it out loud.
“What is the story you’re trying to tell?” They stood before the ship for a
long time, possibly thinking of answers. They left the exhibit holding hands.
If our stories coincide, we are lucky.
There is so much I’d like to share with the anonymous
audience of THE REGISTRY…A woman at the art show told me she’d read about my
previous production, Revision, but
its autobiographical nature scared her, so she didn’t go. All fiction is
autobiography, I wanted to paraphrase Virginia. Every play is personal – never business.
Perhaps one day the theatre world will agree with me. Until then, I’ll worry
about THE REGISTRY and its world, about what I’d like to leave behind, should
this be my last play. But the anonymous audience of THE REGISTRY will know nothing
of this. Ten days from now they’ll come to the theatre, take their seats, open
the program and read
Director’s
Notes
THE REGISTRY is the most fractured play I’ve ever
done. I wrote it during the most difficult semester I’ve had here, between
meetings; (during meetings…); walking home from school writing lines in my head;
during five minute coffee breaks at the end of which I’d find notes pinned to
my office door: “I came by your office but you weren’t there!!!”; standing in
line at the grocery store on the rare occasions I had time to shop for real
food; and, sometimes, ten minutes before rehearsal. This semester – this past year
– left us all breathless, a little short on kindness, a little tense.
I thought, “Time lost patience.” I thought, “The world
is out of joint.” I thought, “This is the Age of Kafka.” With everyone on edge more
than usual, I feel I wrote this play under siege, torn between the illusion
that I was writing a bureaucratic satire, a revenge comedy, and the reality
that, in the end, I couldn’t decide if bureaucracy is a necessary evil, or a
way to level creativity and intelligence to the ground.
As the head of a large academic department, I am –
technically – a bureaucrat. As a creative writer, I find the language and
practices of the bureaucracy absurd and demoralizing. As an expat coming from
the worst dictatorship in Eastern Europe, I know the lengths to which a
bureaucratic empire would go to protect its policies. And so THE REGISTRY
begged to be written, if for no other reason than to expose this unresolved
duality: I am both a bureaucrat and a creative writer. Could I call myself a
creative bureaucrat? (Of course not: the Empire would crumble!)
I’ve learned several things from my past: that at the
heart of every conglomerate (be it corporation or government) there’s a
flourishing bureaucracy; that numbing people’s minds with the impossibility of
extracting anything from a bureaucracy prevents them from asking larger
questions; that our lives often depend on a piece of paper, a petty rule, or a
signature.
The most terrifying scenario I can imagine is a
bureaucracy in charge of our romantic encounters. This is what THE REGISTRY is
about: a giant bureaucracy staffed with fantastical beings who make decisions
about human love; a place that can never be reached, that never grants audiences,
but punishes everyone for not following rules whose small print has not yet
been released.
I believe in order and the necessity of rules, but not
in inflexible regulations enforced at the expense of the individual. I don’t
know if THE REGISTRY solves any of my dilemmas, but writing it felt like
therapy, like a talking cure that reminded me that laughter is the best antidote
to absurdity because it demolishes fear. And without the threat of fear, even the
most elaborate bureaucracy collapses eventually. It’s something to look forward
to, I think.
