Thank you, patient readers

Wow. Two Weeks since my last post! I am so sorry my patient readers and I will try not to go this long without a post again.

It has been a crazy wonderful two weeks, though. I've rehearsed, tech'd and opened in a show, acted in three student film projects, gotten my SAT students through their May test and my GMAT student ready to take his test, performed in a staged reading of a new play, hosted my dear dear friend Alyson from Dubai, and survived both Bruno's two week trip to Europe and Mother's Day. Phew!

Where to start? Well, the play has been bliss every step of the way. And I've felt a new kind of freedom during the rehearsal process that I'm sure is a direct gift from Pedro and Archer. It used to be that when I started working with a new group of people, I would be full of self doubt: Am I good enough to be here? Will the director doubt his/her choice as soon as I open my mouth? Do the other actors like me? Am I cool enough to fit in? This time around, there was no room for any of that noise. I feel like I have been burned clean by the events of this past year, and I am struggling so hard just to be wherever it is that I physically am, that there is no energy left for extraneous nonsense. And, without the burden of my own doubts, my rehearsing and performing have become unfettered: richer and fuller and more deeply free than they have ever been before.

And as it turns out, the other actors do like me, and I am cool enough. Nice.

I also have to mention the laughter. I am not sure I have ever laughed so much as I have during this rehearsal process. Again, I chalk this up to my sons, who have left me with a lack of self-consciousness that has allowed me to experience the sheer joy of a good joke and to crack one back with abandon. The particular collection of people I'm working with are a bunch of cut-ups; showing up for rehearsal sometimes feels like being in the middle of a Muppet Show episode. Good jokes, bad jokes, in-jokes, sex jokes: the energy just flies around the room, one actor topping the next until someone crowns it and we all burst into laughter and return to rehearsing. My face and ribs ache with laughing: after these past nine months I am sorely out of practice. It is so joyful, so appreciative of the moment at hand, and I am so filled with gratitude for the jokes, the joke crackers and the chance to be part of it all.

We had our first preview, our first time performing in front of an audience, this Thursday, and it was magical. As always, as we entered tech at the beginning of the week everything fell apart. We tripped over each other on and off stage, forgot lines, futzed with set pieces and props: the usual chaos. Thursday afternoon we were still getting new technical elements and it felt utterly hopeless that we could even stumble through an evening performance. And yet here came the evening, and there sat the audience, and on went the performers. And, magically, no lines were forgotten (well, not noticeably so...), and gaps tightened, performances bumped up a level, and train wrecks from the afternoon were steaming beautifully down their tracks. Something larger than all of us emerged from our collective creative energy and professional experience and carried both us and the audience through the night. A glorious thing.

And then came Press Night, and then came Opening, and then The Sunday After It All, the freebie performance when you've made it all the way from the start of tech through opening, the directors have all left, and the actors and stage manager now own the show. It is a strange feeling: a combination of abandonment and relaxation. And an excitement to see how things will grow and evolve, now that the fury of creation is done.