Routine. That’s a word that isn’t passed around much these days and any place where we can find it is a win. The goals for this week’s rehearsal were pretty darn routine: refine the scenes, implement transitions, and run the experiment. That feeling of routine helped ease the stress that seems to be building without a ceiling in sight—not regarding the PTP but [gesturing broadly at 2020]. As much as this project has added to the layers of anxiety, I…
Relief. It’s been hard to come by these days. But by way of reason, with all the layers of anxiety I wrote about last week, there must be relief. If there’s dark, there’s light. If there’s heaven, there’s hell. If there’s anxiety, there must be relief. It comes with a pause and a deep breath, if only for a moment. It comes with a hug from my children that I hold onto a little longer than before. And it comes…
We finally made it to the room and it couldn’t have come at a better time. To layer on top of our Covid cases, our Zoom fatigue, and the looming election, our University community was under threat on Friday. The specifics are still being withheld (it’s the subject of an FBI investigation), but the long and short is racists threatened the safely of our community demanding that the Black Lives Matter mural be painted over. I mean. Come. On. So,…
The difference between a possibility and a reality feels limitless once the latter eclipses the former. Two of our ensemble members stayed home last rehearsal because they had been exposed to a positive case and were going to get tested. By this point in the semester, that, sadly, was not unusual or any tremendous call for alarm. I had a similar experience with my son, who had been exposed to a positive case in day care. This is the world…
It is time. Well, almost. It’s almost time. I kept trying to wrap my head around any work I could get done prior to Week Seven’s rehearsal. What are our production needs? What scenes should we pick to experiment with? What should the casts look like? And every time I sat down to do the work, I realized I just didn’t have enough information. I had heard the pitches from the groups last week and they were at various stages…
We’re getting somewhere. Not sure where yet, but it feels like we’re moving towards something real. This has been the great fear all along. What if the work is a dead end? What if the only real pivot under the pandemic is online? What if it was a false premise all along? I wrote a while back, either here in the journal or in my pitches for the PTP, my disdain for online theatre. Now, I haven’t changed my mind…
The theater is dark now but now we are waiting for the chance to do theater in whatever ways we can.
It all started the night my father shot himself. That’s when the voices came Night after night They whisper I cannot understand them Yet they demand answers They start quietly Getting Louder and Louder As the night progresses Soon the whispers become screams I hear their suffering, their anguish There is nothing I can do But listen. I go to mother to make sense of it all…
A cyclical heart wed cynical bones, her persistence and bright blue resistance worn as medallions, voice warm as stone. A fallen tree is a soon risen man, losing leaves in refusal to grieve, You hear that? Tell them I’m not crazy, Ann. A fireplace burns every word he left. Compression soon turns thoughts to obsession, not a single mind to be but bereft. Broken branches reaching like fingertips. Familiar scent of pine, tied in twine with a reach out, eyes…