![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Another Opening, Another Show
Jun. 18th, 2006 11:44 amMy play (for lack of a better word; it's a strange hybrid-piece), That's What We're Here For (an american pageant) opened last night at The Brick's $ellout Festival.
We got through it, but it wasn't fun. Well, except for brief moments, especially when we got the laughs we were trying for (which was most of the time, actually). The actors are great, worked hard in adversity, and shone through, and I'm proud of the script, but the tech was sloppy to nightmarish, and didn't exactly help either the actors or the script. The pace and transitions were wonky, which always throws everything off. The auto-cue on the CD players wasn't always working, so cues were coming up suddenly that shouldn't have been. Halfway through Act I, we discovered the DVD player for the video projections had been rewired (or unwired) to the board so that we couldn't get any sound out of it -- the first two video cues are silent projections -- and suddenly we were facing four video segments with crucial sound; we skipped through three of them briefly enough to get through the transitions they are meant to cover, and I read the backing narration to the other one live. I should have checked it first, I know, but it was fine when I left at 9.00 that morning after Berit's and my all-day/all-nighter on the show (I got up at 6.30 am on Friday and went to bed for two hours only at 11.30 am on Saturday, I finally got about six hours sleep today).
When the tech worked, the show was beautiful. And sometimes even when it wasn't -- sometimes the actors overcame such problems as not being lit while speaking to create beautiful, sublime moments (I wrote the light cues from memory of the show without bodies on stage, which I've often done and I'm usually 75-90% accurate in my cues, and tweak the rest at a tech or after the first performance -- but this was the first time I was doing it from 4.00 am to 9.00 am, falling asleep at the light board as I was -- I was maybe 40% accurate. Maybe). So, Berit and I must go in and rework everything technical before we're up again on Tuesday to make things work better. Or rather, work. And as good as they are, some of the actors need to really go over their lines, cues, and blocking (mainly the latter two; most of the lines were there, just not always in the right places).
There was, before and after, talk as to whether we should, or should have, postponed. I dunno. I have this feeling that you agree to a opening date, you have an audience coming, you go up no matter what, and what you have is what you have. It's theatre. But this is a feeling and probably makes no logical sense. I have only ever postponed the opening of one show (Todd Miller's Mose the Fireman and Das Presley double bill at NADA), and I was very upset about that for quite a while. I felt I had failed in some basic capacity as a craftsman. I was strangely calm during the whole show last night, even as Berit was being angry and upset in the booth next to me and things went to hell. Odd, but no matter how disastrously a performance of one of my shows may be going, I always feel good while it's happening -- "Hey, I've got a show up!" (except the one performance of one show I did where I realized I had a drunk actor onstage -- a VERY drunk actor -- about three minutes into the show, and his behavior was inappropriate and approaching the dangerous without ever getting quite enough there for me to stop the show; but that time, I stewed offstage) It's theatre. It's ephemeral. It's not going to kill anybody if it goes horribly wrong. Of course, the flip side is that each performance is probably the only one these members of the audience is going to see, so an "off" one lives forever in their minds . . .
Maybe I've gotten too used to "miraculously" pulling off big projects without enough time and resources that I think I can always do it (have I caught "Ludlow Street Syndrome"?). Well, we did pull this one off, at least in that we got through it, but it wasn't up to what I usually have on stage, or what it deserves. Yvonne said she thought I might be thinking of this festival run as a dry run for the extension, but no, I never do that, especially as there's no way the extension is guaranteed, particularly if the show doesn't come off well in this run. Though, yeah, if we do get the extension I'd be working it over a hell of a lot more than I did with World Gone Wrong last year, and putting back in tons of the elements I had to cut for time/money/space reasons (the black light sequence, the video puppet show, the descending bare light bulbs, the ladder lights, a LOT more sound cues). But of course, that version of the show may just stay a variant in my head if I don't make this one live up to itself.
It will be many many times better on Tuesday, and after. It's so close, but being just close of the mark with this show is more damaging than with many others. If I create a show again in the way I did this one -- starting with nearly nothing and building it in the rehearsal room with the actors, which I want to do now, again and again -- it will definitely be a long-term rehearsal process with no set performance schedule. We spend as much time as we need creating the show, then when it's ready, we book it and show it. Working this way is fruitful, but not on a deadline (the danger being, as I have seen happen to so many companies, that process takes control of product, and it just becomes a lot of rehearsal-wanking towards no actual set goal, but I think I'm product-minded enough not to let that happen).
Some of the audience reaction afterwards was very rewarding -- Walter Brandes, brother-in-theatre-arms, was honestly praising it (he made an interesting comparison of some of my writing to Stoppard, which I never would have thought of, but damned if I don't think he's got a point), as were a couple of other friends of the cast who were there (though I wish cast members wouldn't run down aspects of a show that went wrong in front of audience members, even if they're friends -- David Mamet is right about that, it just dampens any enthusiasm they had for the show at all). There were some other, polite, noncommittal (but disappointed-sounding) reactions as well, as I expected. Oh, well.
But my dad and stepmom took Berit and I out for a great Thai meal afterwards. Can't beat that.
The cast gave me a lovely birthday cake early Saturday morning (about an hour-and-a-quarter too late, technically), and it sits in the fridge, waiting. Maybe it's a good time for a breakfast slice . . . Sooner or later Berit will get up, and we'll have to face the fixes we have to make.
We got through it, but it wasn't fun. Well, except for brief moments, especially when we got the laughs we were trying for (which was most of the time, actually). The actors are great, worked hard in adversity, and shone through, and I'm proud of the script, but the tech was sloppy to nightmarish, and didn't exactly help either the actors or the script. The pace and transitions were wonky, which always throws everything off. The auto-cue on the CD players wasn't always working, so cues were coming up suddenly that shouldn't have been. Halfway through Act I, we discovered the DVD player for the video projections had been rewired (or unwired) to the board so that we couldn't get any sound out of it -- the first two video cues are silent projections -- and suddenly we were facing four video segments with crucial sound; we skipped through three of them briefly enough to get through the transitions they are meant to cover, and I read the backing narration to the other one live. I should have checked it first, I know, but it was fine when I left at 9.00 that morning after Berit's and my all-day/all-nighter on the show (I got up at 6.30 am on Friday and went to bed for two hours only at 11.30 am on Saturday, I finally got about six hours sleep today).
When the tech worked, the show was beautiful. And sometimes even when it wasn't -- sometimes the actors overcame such problems as not being lit while speaking to create beautiful, sublime moments (I wrote the light cues from memory of the show without bodies on stage, which I've often done and I'm usually 75-90% accurate in my cues, and tweak the rest at a tech or after the first performance -- but this was the first time I was doing it from 4.00 am to 9.00 am, falling asleep at the light board as I was -- I was maybe 40% accurate. Maybe). So, Berit and I must go in and rework everything technical before we're up again on Tuesday to make things work better. Or rather, work. And as good as they are, some of the actors need to really go over their lines, cues, and blocking (mainly the latter two; most of the lines were there, just not always in the right places).
There was, before and after, talk as to whether we should, or should have, postponed. I dunno. I have this feeling that you agree to a opening date, you have an audience coming, you go up no matter what, and what you have is what you have. It's theatre. But this is a feeling and probably makes no logical sense. I have only ever postponed the opening of one show (Todd Miller's Mose the Fireman and Das Presley double bill at NADA), and I was very upset about that for quite a while. I felt I had failed in some basic capacity as a craftsman. I was strangely calm during the whole show last night, even as Berit was being angry and upset in the booth next to me and things went to hell. Odd, but no matter how disastrously a performance of one of my shows may be going, I always feel good while it's happening -- "Hey, I've got a show up!" (except the one performance of one show I did where I realized I had a drunk actor onstage -- a VERY drunk actor -- about three minutes into the show, and his behavior was inappropriate and approaching the dangerous without ever getting quite enough there for me to stop the show; but that time, I stewed offstage) It's theatre. It's ephemeral. It's not going to kill anybody if it goes horribly wrong. Of course, the flip side is that each performance is probably the only one these members of the audience is going to see, so an "off" one lives forever in their minds . . .
Maybe I've gotten too used to "miraculously" pulling off big projects without enough time and resources that I think I can always do it (have I caught "Ludlow Street Syndrome"?). Well, we did pull this one off, at least in that we got through it, but it wasn't up to what I usually have on stage, or what it deserves. Yvonne said she thought I might be thinking of this festival run as a dry run for the extension, but no, I never do that, especially as there's no way the extension is guaranteed, particularly if the show doesn't come off well in this run. Though, yeah, if we do get the extension I'd be working it over a hell of a lot more than I did with World Gone Wrong last year, and putting back in tons of the elements I had to cut for time/money/space reasons (the black light sequence, the video puppet show, the descending bare light bulbs, the ladder lights, a LOT more sound cues). But of course, that version of the show may just stay a variant in my head if I don't make this one live up to itself.
It will be many many times better on Tuesday, and after. It's so close, but being just close of the mark with this show is more damaging than with many others. If I create a show again in the way I did this one -- starting with nearly nothing and building it in the rehearsal room with the actors, which I want to do now, again and again -- it will definitely be a long-term rehearsal process with no set performance schedule. We spend as much time as we need creating the show, then when it's ready, we book it and show it. Working this way is fruitful, but not on a deadline (the danger being, as I have seen happen to so many companies, that process takes control of product, and it just becomes a lot of rehearsal-wanking towards no actual set goal, but I think I'm product-minded enough not to let that happen).
Some of the audience reaction afterwards was very rewarding -- Walter Brandes, brother-in-theatre-arms, was honestly praising it (he made an interesting comparison of some of my writing to Stoppard, which I never would have thought of, but damned if I don't think he's got a point), as were a couple of other friends of the cast who were there (though I wish cast members wouldn't run down aspects of a show that went wrong in front of audience members, even if they're friends -- David Mamet is right about that, it just dampens any enthusiasm they had for the show at all). There were some other, polite, noncommittal (but disappointed-sounding) reactions as well, as I expected. Oh, well.
But my dad and stepmom took Berit and I out for a great Thai meal afterwards. Can't beat that.
The cast gave me a lovely birthday cake early Saturday morning (about an hour-and-a-quarter too late, technically), and it sits in the fridge, waiting. Maybe it's a good time for a breakfast slice . . . Sooner or later Berit will get up, and we'll have to face the fixes we have to make.
