| Rehearsal Junkie |
| Friday, 05 June 2009 |
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Tonight is the reading of my play The Guy From 1992 at the Dramatists Guild of America’s New Works Festival at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. This is my second year in the festival, and it’s shaping up to be a wonderful evening. I have the coolest director ever for this gig. I'm so happy with where she's gone with this whacked little diddy. My actors are hilarious and so sweet and invested. What a gift to see my words lifted with care and projected with reckless abandon. This is the best part of the development process for me. With a good director and actors I trust, I sat in the back of the house yesterday with my purple slasher pen just having a blast collapsing and expanding the story. It was magic. Man, I love being there. Suspended in re-writing with the help of dropped lines, intuitive embellishments and broken beats. There just isn't any better place for me. I am blissed out in these moments. I love rehearsal. I’m a junkie. Sure production is great. It's wonderful and beautiful to watch the script become fully realized before an audience - I mean that's the goal right? I've been there. Sat in the audience and listened to people laugh and cry and hold their breath. You really can hear someone hold their breath. I think that's my favorite. But, when a script makes it that far, I am relatively - okay in fact mostly - superfluous. I'm probably involved in the building of the production, but the real meat of the writing process is over. Give me a large iced latte, three sharpened pencils, and my favorite sweater, and I'm all in. For anything. Whatever the director and cast want to bring. Writing is so much about isolation; the walk we must take with our characters. But my god, the magic is in the collaboration. The sharing of the voices on the page with the voices on the stage. |
