The Unmentionables - June 21
Posted by Bruce Norris on 6/22/2006
This week we entered week 3 of rehearsals. Normally this would seem like a luxurious amount of time, but because of our casting issues (we didn’t have a full cast until week 2) and since we are currently missing Amy Morton from our midst (due to her moving the play Love Lies Bleeding - of which she is the director - to the Kennedy Center in D.C.)… we’ve needed all the time we can get.
I have a fairly high metabolic rate - people tell me that I give off a lot of heat, that my body temperature seems to run a little too high, and I have a tendency to sit in the rehearsal room and twitch with impatience. When I write, I do so partly from the perspective of the actor, hoping that the way that I have heard something in my head will be instinctively understood by them, so when that does not occur - when I seem to have made myself obscure rather than clear and the actors are valiantly struggling to decode my meaning - I feel hapless and impotent and make life in the rehearsal room a living hell with my irritable, squinting presence. That is why I pity our actors and Anna, our director, this week. As they get off book (lines memorized) and approach a real performance of the play things begin to jell, and those parts that don’t jell quite as quickly become fixations for me.
Usually the antidote to this situation is to toss the writer out of the rehearsal room so as to give the company the time they need to create.
But my anality (if that is a word) and need for Stalinesque control is so vast that my banishment usually backfires - I return only to redouble my rate of furious scribbling and correcting. This is all a long-winded way of apologizing to everyone who has had to put up with me these past 2 weeks, and to reassure them that I will start to relax when…. oh, who am I kidding? I won’t relax. I’ll probably die of a heart attack at 50 and, in rigor mortis, finally achieve the rigidity I’ve been approaching all my life.
Cheerful. Anyway, things are moving along and we’re making adjustments here and there so that we will, hopefully, be in tolerable shape when we move into the theater on Saturday, when a whole new set of problems, technical in nature, will start to present themselves.