Progress

I’ve always appreciated professionalism. This is not surprising. What is surprising is that, more often than not, I’ve encountered it working with amateurs, not professionals. I dislike intensely the word “amateur.” It has such a mocking, negative connotation. What is a “professional?” Let’s take theatre students, for instance. While they’re taking classes, learning how to act, learning tricks, really, are they not a bunch of amateurs in training? The label (theatre department) assures them of the opposite. And yet so many professional actors are stuck in a rut. They have their bag of tricks and, having reached a certain level of ease on the stage, they stagnate. There’s no more learning, no evolution and, the deadliest thing of all, no curiosity. No fear. The amateur is curious, terrified, receptive. Ok, so they can’t do a hundred shows and sustain the same intensity, but I take curiosity over stamina any day.

I was thinking about this yesterday during a longer rehearsal. (I have developed this strange schizo-capacity to do one thing and think about another, like direct a scene and talk to the actors while thinking about professionalism, for instance. It’s odd, but lucrative). C. had a headache; had been to the doctor only the other day, had laryngitis and a virus of some sort, and yet she didn’t miss a beat. I’m not saying there isn’t work to be done – we still have to work on almost every other sentence because there are nuances I want and because this play is pretty static, and depends strictly on the precision of the dialogue and mood. So I’m not saying C. didn’t miss a beat because everything was perfect. What I’m talking about is professionalism, the fact that despite all of that she was there, on time, prepared, inhabiting the character a little more with every reading. C. has excellent comedic timing which is great because it can’t be taught. There is a good portion of the play where she has little to say because Death just made an appearance and Night is mesmerized like a little boy with a new toy, so C. has the occasional line (bitter, resentful, funny) which is meant to interrupt the growing connection between Night and Death. She does that perfectly.  Because of that niceness I was mentioning a few entries ago, a genuine kindness, I believe, that exists under the polite surface, her voice can acquire incredibly soothing tones. In the last scene in which she says good bye to Night after discovering his first name, there is a tenderness and a sadness in her voice that almost kills me. It’s exactly what I had imagined and it makes me terribly, terribly happy.

After rehearsal, on the way home, E. said, “You know, I have to really work for this one. In all the other plays, I was a little bit myself, versions of myself. This is completely different. I have to find a voice, a pitch, a rhythm, even a new way of moving.” She was right and, for the first time, I thought I found an explanation for her multiple deaths all these years on the stage, a death at the end of each play. Perhaps I tried to teach her something in every production without even realizing it. Like “don’t date losers, baby.” “Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not good enough.” “Don’t hesitate when there’s something you want.” Believe me, I realize how incredibly obvious these statements are, but put them on the stage wrapped inside a flawed (hence human) character and they acquire importance – even magnitude. And perhaps E.’s character died in every play because I was – again, without realizing it – eliminating that part of her character I thought might harm her in the long run. Whatever her age, E. is my child, and sometimes I believe that what I do is simply rearrange the world in an attempt to prepare her for it. 

Toward the end of the rehearsal yesterday I sent everybody home but E. and K. to work on Death’s entrance, on her outer-worldly walk; on E. and K.’s Western impulses. The difference (at least on the stage) between East and West is colossal. It’s mostly a difference of rhythm and perception (the perception of one’s body and its possibilities) that needs to be internalized. I will have to spend hours teaching E.and K. to slow down, to practice slow motion, to understand what happens to time and space when the body is still. I have to teach them the importance of a ritual performed with conviction. The meeting between Death and Night is a ceremony. Night meets mortality face to face and is attracted to it. Death is curious. Curiosity needs to be satisfied so she studies Night without touching him. Her hands glide over his face, his body, without ever making contact. She learns his shape. She gets very close. She terrifies him. To do this physically, on the stage, with public seated two feet away and without lights that emphasize the strangeness of the movement is extremely risky. One false move (one unconvincing, self-conscious move) and the whole thing collapses. Laughter would be deadly here.

I’m terrified of working without lights. I’ve relied on their capacity to produce awe on the stage for so long, that this is my way of fighting my own demons. I don’t know how anything will look. If I want magic it can’t be “fabricated,” it can’t be tricky: there has to be magic in the physical encounter between E. and K. The connection has to be there so intensely, the public must feel it developing.

It was strange (a little earlier in last night’s rehearsal) to dissect K. before everyone else, to explain to him his own coping mechanisms so visible from a distance, to see him blush or burst into uncontrollable laughter (another coping mechanism). I always wonder (usually after I do it, never before) if I’ve gone too far, if this is the time when he’ll tell me to back off, to leave intact at least one portion of his being. It hasn’t happened yet but I am afraid because I have to push him much harder from now on.

We’ll see…For now, this is progress. Slowly, slowly, people are coming together, getting used to one another, getting used to the internal space I have created for them, subjecting themselves to my harsh comments perhaps knowing that, underneath it all, lies my immense gratitude for the fact that they are the only people who can bring to life the world in my head. For that, I am immensely, impossibly grateful.

The Crew

September 13, 2013

I’ve always found prep work as interesting as the final result. Let me explain: people go to the theatre and what they see in that hour and a half is the result of hundreds of hours of rehearsal, and long, often exhausting discussions with lighting, sound, and costume designers, with the stage manager and the rest of the crew. In my case the exhaustion is triggered by a lack of funds (S. and I have pretty much paid for all the materials necessary for every production), lack of proper venues, lack of support for this odd way of working on a play: months of prep and then one single show.

I’ve explained many, many times why the one show, but for all the new people who might be following us this time, here it is again: this theatre ensemble is my research lab. I do a play when I want to try something new, that’s why I never start with a complete text, a clear idea, or a rigid structure, but with something like an incomplete image that’s trying to find a shape. Whatever I learn on the stage in the process of producing the play, I take back to the playwriting seminar in an often desperate attempt to stop the “theatre on paper” movement that assures people that they can write plays without ever leaving their studies, as if they were writing a story or a poem.

I never charge admission (I don’t work in a theatre department or a repertory theatre so I don’t have to have a certain number of shows or make a profit). By the time we present the play, I think of it as a successful experiment (the image has a shape, the play its rhythm), or perhaps a classical concert offered only once. By the time the opening (and closing) night comes around, we have achieved whatever it is that we were looking for so repetition would accomplish nothing. Because I’m doing this mostly for me and my students (the people I work with), because they are students with insane schedules and busy lives, all I can ask from them is to work with me and sustain the intensity I demand of them for one evening. I can’t ask them to do this for weeks, show after show, I can’t ask them to go on tour. It wouldn’t be fair or possible. So I/we exist in this relative anonymity which gives me/us enormous freedom.

I was talking about the prep work, the backstage world the public isn’t privy to. I’ve always made that visible, not only because it is that backbone of every production but because, for me, the crew and the cast members are interchangeable. In a perfect world, the cast of a play would become the crew of the next production and vice versa. I think that the more the actors know about the work of the sound guy or the lighting designer or the stage manager, the more they can appreciate it. I’ve often had the actors interact with the crew during productions; I’ve had sound guys leave the booth and perform, for a while, on the stage; I’ve had characters have extensive discussions with the lighting designer, I’ve gone out of my way to make this clear: what you see is only half of what goes into a production. Let me show you the rest, the other, parallel world that sustains the reality you inhabit at this moment.

“Noir” is no exception to this rule, only the rule has changed slightly because, for the first time in 11 years, I’m not working with the same lighting designer. I am, in fact, working with no lighting designer which seems insane, seeing that the visual element in my plays dictates their mood entirely. This decision was not made in haste: I simply cannot bring myself to work with someone else. I need a moment to process this loss. This is a problem, a difficulty which I’ve decided to treat as an opportunity. I decided to light the stage with dozens of lamps of all shapes and colors. I also decided to bring the public onto the stage, create some sort of intimate, claustrophobic performance space, almost theatre in the round but not really, where the public is about two feet away from the actors. This way, instead of watching/judging the show from a distance (impossible without good lights), they’re part of the show, and the illumination, improvised as it is, seems familiar, like any kind of lighting one would have in a private space –  a living room, or an office. That’s my hope anyway. In reality, I have no idea what the set will look like…

So S., who’s the artist responsible for my sets for about 9 years now, will be a silent character in the play, Night’s charwoman, who will dust, and clean, and turn lamps on and off as scenes demand it. S. can be immensely funny, and although her life has been a bit shattered lately, I know that I can count on her as I have for the past decade. These work relationships turned friendships that nothing can destroy are experienced by few people. I am lucky. I have very few friends, but they are people I will always know, people who will always trust me.

I asked J to do sound not only because he came highly recommended by the best stage manager I’ve ever worked with, but because, having worked with him in the playwriting workshop, I knew he had a brain, a sense of humor, and rhythm. J is a poet, and a very good one (a rare occurrence in a creative writing program), so that’s already a guarantee of rhythm. Also, there’s something about his appearance, some sort of understated assurance that looks great on the stage. J will be visible, his soundboard placed somewhere behind Night’s desk. Before the play begins, as the public walks in, I want them to feel like they’re intruding on J’s territory, slightly inconveniencing him. When the public occupies the safe place which is the house, seated at a respectable distance from “the action,” they feel detached, spectators not participants; they feel entitled. Let’s see what happens when this safe space no longer exists, when they have to walk on the stage and disturb J who’s having dinner, chatting away with the cleaning lady, eating and drinking like a lunatic Viking. I’m sorry. I’ve no idea where the Viking image came from. Probably Hollywood productions where Vikings always eat a lot before having rough sex. The sex is never shown on film (this is old Hollywood we’re talking about), but would be implied by the incessant food and wine consumption. An insatiable hunger would translate into a lust for life – something like that. But back to J: I want him to eat with abandon, with recklessness. Not quite sure why yet: perhaps because when we spot insatiable appetites we feel uncomfortable. Ok, so there’s a bit of Artaud here as well. There always is.

S.B. is the stage manager. I nominated her for the drama award last year (which she got, by the way) for writing a play inspired by a poster announcing, I believe, the construction of a mechanical goat. How can one not nominate such a text after drowning in all that realism? S.B. is very efficient and, what’s more, she claps happily and giggles approvingly (but not annoyingly) whenever a scene begins to work. This is incredibly beneficial for the morale during rehearsals when I forget to thank people for their work because I focus so intensely on the parts that are still out of joint. (S., the artist, used to do this in every rehearsal – she would laugh and clap every time, with renewed enthusiasm – not the loud, fake, theatre person laugh…you know what I’m, talking about, right? That obnoxious, loud, “Ha!Ha!Ha!” one hears during mediocre shows that nobody else finds amusing…so no, nothing like that. S. would confess later that, with every rehearsal, she’d notice other nuances to the comedy because the actors would add subtle inflections, or pauses, or something that would make an already memorized dialogue line new.)

I expect it will be difficult working with two new actors and an almost entirely new crew and not relying, for the first time, on a lighting design that can make the ordinary beautiful.

I’ll have to work with ugly, and claustrophobic and desolating, which is the world of Mr. Night, a world he often makes disappear by closing his eyes. But what I cannot have in lights I managed to accomplish in sound with songs that are neither entirely melancholy nor just haunting, but a combination of the two – sounds of collective solitude and unguarded affection which often foreshadow the impossibility of a happy end.

This is the crew.

The Actors

September 12, 2013

E. has been announcing her departure from the Milena Theatre Group for years now. It’s a Cher moment we all enjoy, “the last play,” followed by the next “last play,” and now the next one. I think “Noir” might truly be her last performance with the group.  She said, “In every single play you’ve done, I die at the end. Now I’m playing Death. Is this Freudian?”  Twelve years of plays (here). Twelve death sentences. (Why does “A Very Long Engagement” come to mind?) There’s something very strange about last performances. Sometimes their intensity – there’s so much more at stake – affects the entire cast and this has an impact on the relationship between the characters.

I remember a “last performance” that wasn’t exactly that, but had a similar effect: a dying man, a great director, was working on “The Cherry Orchard” with the knowledge that it would be his last play. The cast felt it in every rehearsal and became strangely unified – one body, one voice, chasing that one ideal performance. The last scene (remember it? The orchard is destroyed, the old servant forgotten) is utter and complete desolation. In this production, the director chose to empty the stage of any human presence at that moment. The family has moved on. The house is empty. In the distance, the sound of an ax hitting a tree. And then, a solitary cart rolls downhill and stops, hesitantly, downstage center. The lights fade. The orchard takes its last breath and that lonely, empty cart going nowhere says it all. The man didn’t get to see the opening night. The dress rehearsal was “the last performance.”

This is depressing. E. is not dying. She’s moving on, to graduate school, to another city, another world altogether. I realize that I have a love-hate relationship with “last performances” but also know that, after all that dying, there’s no one better to play the Angel of Death.

The femme fatale presented a problem from the very beginning: first, her type is not easy to come by. You don’t wake up one morning and decide that, from now on, you’re going to be “fatale” and wither any man that crosses you. Physically, I’ve always been partial to the diminutive “fatales” – tiny but deadly porcelain dolls. The girl in “Brick” has that look. The look, the voice, the movements. Second, I wanted a different kind of femme, capable of playing the noir part to perfection (“I’m stupidly in danger but I’m gorgeous. Take away my troubles and I might sleep with you!”), but also becoming immensely human, self-sacrificing even, when we shift from noir to fantasy. That’s when I met C. in my Postmodernism class. She had the look; she almost had the voice; she had the talent (I realized during a cold reading of Stoppard), but was impossibly nice. I wondered if I would succeed in toning down that quality. I asked her to be in the play. I over-explained the time commitment, the grueling two weeks before the show, my need for perfection. She smiled sweetly. I thought, “You don’t believe me, do you?” They never do. And then the two hour repetition of a single movement begins as I inform the cast that a minute on the stage, a well-choreographed, obsessively staged minute takes an eternity in rehearsal. Then they believe me, but by then it’s too late.

There’s a certain aloofness about C., a reserve, a barrier I haven’t been able to break. It’s possible I never will. And if I do, it’s possible that I won’t know it, because she’ll smile at me through her tears. I wonder what’s on the other side of the barrier. I wonder if there’s an enchanted territory there which I can’t access because it is invisible to the naked eye, like the fairyland in “True Blood.” For now, I imagine a land of exemplary, healthy people whose optimism would devastate me. I hesitate to trespass.

S. Night would not exist had I not met the real man, an impossible combination of Steppenwolf and something else: fragility, refined intelligence, an instinct for nobler things arrested by a pathological distaste for prolonged human contact.  In class he spoke in measured sentences punctuated by excruciating silences. Dismissed by some of the faculty as “hesitant, indecisive,” unknown to most of the other graduate students, he survived inside a protective shell – fortress or prison, I couldn’t be sure. The class found his silences uncomfortable. I found them fascinating. Here is a man who thinks before he speaks, I thought. How he takes his time, how he fights the impulse to run and leave us all behind with our judgments, and fears, and preconceived ideas.

I didn’t see K. for a long time after that first class. Oddly, I had a sense of temporary loss, as if I had misplaced something, a favorite volume or an object of nostalgic value. Then, miraculously, he reappeared in my next class and then the next. Always reassuringly quiet, always dressed impeccably, like a mild-mannered Kafka clerk. I began to see him, the other one, the one called Night. Alone in his warehouse, preparing a banquet for one every evening, drinking water out of a wine glass, eating a sandwich he took time preparing as if it were filet mignon. I saw him sitting at his desk waiting for his first client, patiently, lost in one of his interminable silences. They (both Night and his real counterpart) would not be visible from a distance. There are people who become attractive only upon close inspection, with the world in soft focus. In a crowd, they are completely unremarkable. Up close though, one begins to notice a certain way of articulating thoughts, mannerisms that betray a complex internal mechanism, emotions hidden in the slightest hesitation before a word.  I guess the fragility of such a character (for a while I had the distinct impression that Night would break under the pressure of circumstance), comes from the fact that he only externalizes emotions that have already consumed him. Auster calls these guys “internal émigrés,” exiles inside the vast territories of their internal being. K. is all of this, the perfect Night, a Steppenwolf of my own making. His (re)invention has had a strange side-effect: nostalgia, a constant flow of memories and inarticulate obsessions I try to keep in check. It is immensely difficult.

These are the actors.

Noir

September 11, 2013

Rehearsals have begun for “Noir- A Farce Macabre,” the play I didn’t want to do, the play I promised myself I’d never do because, like “The Happiness Machine,” it’s a bit too close to home. But then again, what’s the point of doing plays that don’t reveal anything other than technique or, maybe, a certain kind of cleverness? I used to think that was a good enough reason to stage a play. I no longer do.

Still, I wouldn’t have begun work on “Noir” if the perfect people hadn’t walked into my class. This is how trouble always starts: it’s the first day of class, and people introduce themselves, and I think I see something –  a gesture, the smallest thing…I can’t describe it. Something that I find interesting or curious. My curiosity has never failed me so far. I just know, at the end of the first week, that these will be the people I’m going to work with, and a story at the back of my mind begins to take shape, and I resist it, and then there comes a day when resisting seems pointless.

 “Noir” is the story of a private detective, one S. Night, whose office is housed inside an abandoned lamp factory. So far he’s never had a case, but that doesn’t prevent him from setting up shop every day, narrating with the best of them, carving some sort of life for himself. I’ve noticed (I’ve no idea if this is a good or a bad thing) that, whatever my plays are about, at the heart of the story there is always a Steppenwolf –  a solitary man whose isolation from the world I find incredibly attractive. These men are not heroic. On the contrary, the smallest thing, like the encounter with a woman, can shatter their world for good. Or perhaps they are heroic but their heroism does not manifest itself in the usual way, but in the strangest kinds of excellent adventures. And at the end of each adventure they are defeated. Ok. So every play I’ve ever written is a love letter to Don Quijote. So shoot me. I can’t help it. I struggled with this bothersome romantic impulse all my life, until I got old and thought I should embrace it. Pity I didn’t do it when I was 20 and still had a chance with the wolf of the steppe…But I’m digressing.

The uneventful life of Mr. Night is disrupted one evening when a movie star hires him to solve a curious case. The femme fatale explains that some people she knows, people who have been shot, stabbed or crushed by 18 wheelers, are not dying. Nobody has, in fact, died in a long time. She suspects foul play. Night, versed in the occult, suspects the case may be miraculous in nature. So far, everything unfolds in proper noir fashion: the private eye (private I?)  is very private, the femme is terribly fatale. But what I want to do with this play is switch genres in the middle, take a classic detective story and turn it supernatural. And so, when Night conducts a séance to see if he can get any information from the afterlife (Holmes has the irregulars; Night has his ghosts), a woman appears, materializes out of darkness, without memory, identity or a name. Night is smitten and horrified at the same time. For the first time in his life he plays games, plays for time, becomes a true armchair detective and tries to solve a case without ever leaving his (ware)house. By the end of a series of imaginary adventures, he knows the creature he has summoned is Death, and Death has lost her memory and, with it, her purpose. If he helps her remember, somebody will die: perhaps even the movie star he has become so fond of. This frames Night’s dilemma: if he saves the girl (any hero would) and doesn’t help Death remember, the world is in danger. If he saves the world (and what hero wouldn’t?), the girl might die. Poor Mr. Night, in love with a woman and the Angel of Death at the same time, faced with his terrible weakness, forced to make a decision. I feel for him; I’m a little in love with him, the way I am with every Steppenwolf. I want him to win. He never does. It’s not death he fears but a different kind of solitude, one which exists to remind him of the girl he’s lost and the angel he almost tricked into mercy.

These are the characters: Night, the Movie Star, and Death. The people capable of bringing them to life have just realized (during tonight’s rehearsal, perhaps), that they are at the beginning of a long process that requires precision, insane focus, and love. There’s no way around it. Deadly theatre is not just boring theatre but theatre made without love. Who was it that said something similar about teaching and stirred up indescribable outrage? How dare she? Love? In the classroom? What’s with this promiscuity? Are our children in danger? Has education become a sex act? Fools, the lot of them. Sex has nothing to do with it. Affection, on the other hand, for one’s subject, for one’s characters, for the people who bring them to life, if only for a second, is the only way to go.  Tonight: the characters. Tomorrow: the actors. For now, good night.

A few realizations

It's amazing how intense this play has become. When we got together for a first reading it seemed so...I don't know: funny and harmless. Now, after a few months of rewritings, draining rehearsals and tweaking, it is an intensely personal, incredibly emotional experience. Perhaps this has something to do with Dan's screams when his emotions are extracted against his will. Perhaps it's Laura, announcing the extractions with a measured, chilling voice. Perhaps it's Conni who has become incredible in the part of Cordelia Stark. She's always been very good, intensely professional, focused and graceful, but somehow, Cordelia has made her even better. I sit there in awe of her improv moments thanking my lucky stars. Mike, as the android who can be programed to become any character the emotives need, is in his element. As "The Performance Artist With No Talent" though, he channels something between Brecht and Fellini I never thought I would see on my stage.

And then there's Ellie, of whom I ask so much, whose transitions from devastating unhappiness to amazing well-being are so abrupt, she has about two seconds to adjust her character. And she does it every time, carrying the most difficult parts of the war scenes, demanding a colossal love affair from Gray, enacting moments of suburban heaven and unspeakable humiliation with equal conviction.

We spent an excruciating weekend setting lighting cues (with less than 15 instruments) until the stage looked almost the way I imagined it. What poor theatre? We got that beat. Grotowski has nothing on us. I was wondering out loud, the other day, what to call the theatre beyond "poor theatre" so we could name this thing we do every year. Catastrophic theatre? Asylum theatre? Trashcan theatre? Perhaps. It continues to amaze me how many extremely well-funded, terrible productions I've seen in the past 20 years or so. Perfect lighting systems, exquisite sound booths, money for costumes and props...and yet, at the end of the evening, you wonder why you spent two hours there instead of doing something useful...

I don't know how Jamie, with whom I've worked for the past 11 years, does it every time. I have never seen anyone so capable of improvising lighting cues the way she does. Everything is so very difficult. Money, lighting, sound -- and yet, at the end of our productions people get married or get desperate (same thing, really), or cry, or go home and spend the next few hours in uninterrupted silence. All of this has happened to us, so let's hear it for trashcan theatre, for extraordinary (and extraordinarily patient) people, for lots of work and tons of worries. Perhaps my maddening attention to detail -- the thing that keeps me awake at night when, instead of sleeping, I make lists of things that need fine-tuning -- is what saves us every time. I know people hate it during these last weeks of nightly rehearsals, but on opening night it all pays off.

I hope this happens on Saturday as well. It needs to happen, it must. I am too attached to this mad play to see it fail because of a few, insecure transitions. Let's hope I can communicate this to the cast and crew tonight. They're tired, overworked. They need me to tell them how I feel about them, but I'm not good at speeches, so I write these entries hoping they will read them and know how much I appreciate everything they do. But it's late and I have to go, so this entry will have to end abruptly, like an emotion extracted prematurely from its host.

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.

Details

Our third day on the stage in a building that's going to be the death of me. How can I both love and hate it with such a passion? The space is awful and glitchy and can burst into flames at any moment. The space is open and wonderful because it allows me to discard all the rules of serious (read "deadly") theatre, one by one. I combine (shamelessly) elements of realism with touches of Strindberg, Durrenmatt and Craig. I ask the actors to be guided by the rhythm of the melody that accompanies their dialogue. The movement of the entire piece is dictated by the tension between moments of extraordinary sadness and mad bouts of comedy. I emphasize the cartoony character of I.N.S.E.C.T's personnel and the difficult humanity of the emotives.

In the play, humanity is more of a curse than a blessing. Having emotions, feeling things intensely, falling in and out of love are punishable offenses. At the end people are offered a choice: to be human (read, "a mess") or to go through life feeling nothing, protected from emotions and their misery. What would you choose? What would I choose if I had a choice?

It is difficult for me to focus entirely on details at this point (why repertory theatres ignore details almost always is a mystery to me). I have to deal with the faulty wiring, the noisy speakers, the loud neon sign that illuminates the exits, and the 250 props that somehow find their way downstage center .

One thing was confirmed today, though: I am surrounded by extraordinary people. I wrote a panicky message to Karl, KRVS's extraordinary sound engineer, and he came at the end of the day to fix all of our sound problems. I also wrote to Jamie, asking her to drop by one of these days (before the tech rehearsal on Saturday) and see how many lights are still working and what gels we need for the show. She came in today before we began rehearsal and assured me that all the lights we had for The Happiness Machine are still there.

I don't know what I did in another life to deserve these people. I don't know what I did to deserve the casts that I work with, or Susan and her paintings, or Drew and his profound understanding of structures and environments (particularly the artificial environments on the stage), or Chun who's doing sound for the first time but understands completely my need for perfectionism.

Details make the play: a particular movement that occurs on a particular musical beat; a certain inflection of the voice that anchors an entire scene; a spectacular shade of red that suggests a particular emotion, and so on. The position of the actors' hands in a moment of respiro. A delicate caress. An exaggerated walk. A sigh. A look. Everything choreographed to the second, repeated and perfected until it looks efortless, like a happy accident.

I was worried about Dan tonight. He looked rough, existential, dark. Is the character of the emotive getting to him? Mike is coming down with a cold, Ellie is overworked, Conni walked in yesterday announcing the worst day of her life. Laura...I'm not sure about Laura. This is her first play and -- I am told -- I am an acquired taste so I don't know how she feels yet. I try things out, make one demand one moment, and the opposite demand a moment later. I experiment, discard, try again. Everything is trial and error until the errors fade in the background and some new form of life -- not quite real, not entirely artificial either -- is born on the stage.

This is my refuge and my laboratory. These people are my friends and my army and we have declared war against all things ordinary. I want a theatre of extraordinary gestures and legendary love affairs. I want to create characters whose lives I envy. I want to tear down the barriers between tragedy and comedy. I want a drama that makes the public giddy and a farce that brings them to their knees.

I'm beginning to sound like Dr. Who, when he has one of those terrific end-of-the-episode monologues that create intergalactic incidents. I want to be the cause of an intergalactic incident. Then I can rest for a while.