Days later I am still enjoying the warmth of the whiskey and wassail from seeing The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart. In my previous post, I observed the play is invested in the idea that how we talk to one another, the stories we use to make sense of love and what happens after, matter. Couplets and alliteration build relationships throughout the play by granular acts of comparison, accreting over time like the snow audiences are asked to make from bar napkins and sprinkle on Pru as she passes by. It’s a sentiment at the heart of every record DJ and stamp collector, every football fan and wine aficionado: as Nick Horby put it in High Fidelity, “what really matters is what you like, not what you are like . . . books, records, films—these things matter.”

For Pru, it is the border ballad, a sung narrative poem from that porous region between the Scottish south and English north, that matters. Apparently, for Lucifer, so too does the border ballad offer some satisfaction for a life exiled to a Bed-and-Breakfast overlooking the only public parking lot of a rural border town. “Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks” are Satan’s library shelves, which Pru calls a “heaven” so we don’t miss the allusion to Milton’s paradise. Like Eden, the Scottish border town is a place inbetween, a neutral zone not quite heaven or earth, not quite alive or dead. As we were all asked to hold up the books strewn on our pub tables to physically embody Pru’s paradise, I realized we were becoming a part of the interiority that is the subject of her research.

All scholars are collectors by necessity. Critics and scientists alike collect as many cases of a phenomena that they can find—whether it be a recurring motif or gene anomaly—from which to build a case. In the play, Pru argues that Hell has an “inherent interiority” revealed through the ballad descriptions of the devil’s “supernatural habitat.” With that method in mind, I began to listen for the ways this ballad of Prudencia Hart (of which we were a part) described the seat of the Morning Star, called by others Pandemonium, Sheol, and Hades. In the spirit of the Christmastide’s twelve days, Hell is

● “something out of” paintings by “Pasolini” and “Bruegel,” or books by “the Marquis de Sade” and “Keats.”
● being invited to a pub “ladies restroom” orgy, and then uninvited.
● puking a “Scotch pie supper” and “Flaming Sambucas shots” “all over a lavatory bowl like a poem.”
● wanting to “punch in the throat” the yob who puts national identity and heritage art in “air quotes,” and then being unable to start.
● stuck in a “room full of sex, song, and violence” but unable to take part.
● boredom so deep you “watch rain fall in a car park.”
● a bungalow Bed-and-Breakfast with only puzzles for company.
● forced to accept the kindness of a stranger despite seeing his footprints “leave behind no tracks in the snow.”
● “locked in a library,” and locked out.
● falling in love with the devil in order to leave him.
● forgetting how “to value anything when faced with the eternity of time.”
● knowing you can only find your song when you “have someone to sing it to.”

Our “primal need to categorize” those books and ballads that matter is, the play suggests, a radical act of hope. Without all the time in the world, card catalogues and digital databases are shortcuts to help us read, listen to, and watch what we care about because death will otherwise beat us to it. The collector’s index is a short-cut through hell, from which we can choose the best bits where “meaning is still firmly attached to words.”

The post Fresh Eyes on Prudencia Hart, part 2 first appeared on Artists Repertory Theatre.

Listening at the table, The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart pops and fizzes with cultural specificity. The play opens with two dueling folk ballads—narrative poems meant to be read aloud to maximize their oral-formulaic techniques and evinced in pre-modern cultures the world over—that capture the different stakes attached to nature and death between the English and the Scots. In the former, a recently deceased knight is guarded over by a hawk and a hound, those animals central to defining courtly status and genteel skill. Eventually, a fair maid finds his body and buries it in order to stave off ravenous “corbies,” the Scotch word for crows. In this vision, “nature is essentially benign” and “the knight’s death does not change his place at the center of a world of love, loyalty, and human kindness.” Or so the footnote, narrated by Prudencia, goes.

The Scottish interpretation is much darker, colliding the dynamics of patriarchal power with a fundamentally disinterested environment. Fallen in a dike, that recessed area just within castle walls for all manner of fluid to drain, “lies a new-slain knight,” a medieval symbol typical of Scotland, France, and England to imply post-coital exhaustion. (Knights suffering thigh wounds in battle were, likewise, well-worn euphemisms for infertility.) No one knows of the knight newslain and still in the mire of his excretions except for “his hawk, his hound, and his lady.” Instead of tending to him, the three symbols of gendered status pursue instead their intended tasks of hunting in all its guises, including the lady, who “takes another mate.” While “many a one for him” inquires, he is never found. Time simply moves on; “we make our dinner sweet” and the wind continues to “blow forever more.”

The Scottish version is highly ambivalent, providing us many footholds to enter into its critique of the knight’s relationship with the natural world. One thing it offers is a key to Prudencia’s surname, Hart, the epitome of love imagery in Renaissance poetry. The hunt by the mature male deer, or hart, for the newly mature female deer, or hind, was the central image of unrequited love for the Italian inventor of the sonnet, Petrarch. Sir Thomas Wyatt adapted many of Petrarch’s poems to his own ends (not unlike the English conscription of the Scottish corbies), most famously in “Whoso List to Hunt?” (1577):

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is a hind,
But as for me, alas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.

The speaker or beloved, the hart, chases a hind he knowns he cannot capture. The homonym of “hart” and “heart” is intentional here, both activated for any listening audience. The speaker knows he cannot capture his love, but also cannot leave the hunt, captured as he is by the desire for her. Like Paolo Uccello’s best-known painting, The Hunt in the Forest (1470), the thrust here is not in the particular desires or persona of the pursued beloved, the hind, but rather in the gendered, specifically male competition the chase of her makes possible. Wyatt’s speaker both warns off other men from the unsatisfying hunt, and indicates to them a certain covert knowledge.

With the completist vigor of any good academic, Prudencia is obsessed with such conscriptions of the artifacts of national heritage and, by extension, the appropriation of Scotland’s “collective psyche.” She embraces in the folk ballad that which unsettles our assumptions about the Scottish landscape—the highlands seemingly as inextricable from tourism adverts as the kilt. The snow in which she is enveloped seems almost plucked out of James Joyce’s seminal short story, “The Dead” (1914) about a similar scene in an Irish household, including the sacrifice of the depth and complexity of a woman’s memory and emotional life to male ego. The snow there is anything but “banal,” throwing up a stark contrast to the more nefarious aspects of nationalism and hospitality, where poverty and social stricture masquerade as drink and conviviality.

Dismissal of the footnotes in which Prudencia speaks, the apparatus for tracing intellectual bread crumbs, serves as a metonym for the dismissal of Prudencia’s values: that how we talk to one another, the stories we use to make sense of love and what happens after, matter. Couplets and alliteration build relationships throughout the play by granular acts of comparison, accreting over time like snow piling so that

If you surrender your thought to metre
You surrender yourself to the poem’s beat, or
Rhyme or formula or words or sounds
The author is lost and creation found
[ . . . ]
The tighter the form, the less control
We have over meaning or, you might say, soul.

Like the lais (the French interpretation of the ballad tradition) of the earliest female poets on record, Marie de France, the fairy world of King Arthur and his knights echo the political problems of the human realm. We require an imaginative space, full of poetry and rhythm, in order to ask necessary conceptional questions. Such questions are separate from practical ones, too often mire in a need for immediate application; for example, asking what motivates the devil to keep human company is really the first step in sorting out how to escape his landscape.

Prudencia Hart first premiered with the National Theatre of Scotland—a company notably, intentionally without a physical home—in the wake of a general election with the largest swing vote in Scottish history. It cut a path through the snow to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum where, to the shock of many, only fifty-five percent believed that Britain and Scotland were “Better Together,” to use the Labor campaign slogan. At the end of 2019, the United Kingdom remains entrenched in a two-year debate whether to withdraw from the European Union, itself formed as an antidote to nationalist extremisms that facilitated World War II. In this context of climate change, anti-intellectualism, and political conflict where UK coherence is yet again threatened as Scotland wishes to remain with the EU, the play resonates prescient conceptual questions, including how does knowing a tradition set us free?

The post Fresh Eyes on Prudencia Hart, part 1 first appeared on Artists Repertory Theatre.

She laughs to herself and shifts back and forth in front of a TV monitor showing a rendering of the set, making us laugh too. She speaks as the director of a show ready to find its emotional core, not recite schematics.

“When I moved to Portland neither of these theaters were for me,” she says. “Nothing they [Artists Rep or PCS] did reflected me – except sometimes in February.” We laugh again, but this time it’s that School Girls brand of laughter, the kind where you immediately notice the barbs.

Now I’m at the first preview in the Armory where this co-production between Artists Rep and PCS is being mounted, and there’s indeed a set, and there is a roof. It’s beautiful. The sunlight comes in through the windows just the way you’d want it to, the brightly-lit realism setting the scene for something you might see on TV. It’s accompanied by ‘80s sitcom sound design to further evoke School Girls’ 1986-ness. Midway through the show – during The Greatest Love of All, the group number that left everyone in fits at the first table read – out comes a disco ball, the lights transporting us to a teenage prom fantasy straight from Saved by the Bell.

The audience loses it.

But – the audience. I’m getting ahead of myself.

When I first get to my seat and admire the roof Lava assured us there would be, I look to the program and see not just School Girls but Hedwig and the Angry Inch, PCS’ concurrent production, looking back at me. It’s not even February yet – granted, it’s close – and I’m in an arts venue featuring two plays in two theatres, representing the combined work of two theatre companies, with two all-Black casts. This feels overdue.

But knowing what I know about School Girls’ narrative arc, the cynic in me wonders how many white locals will celebrate this representation just for representation’s sake, for awkward declarations of “Black Girl Magic,” without grappling the play’s examinations of colorism, class, privilege, and assimilation. Flipping through the program, I wonder what cultural barriers will be encountered and where fragility may be triggered or deployed. Then I land on a page with an insert card, its printed text directed right at the reader.

It says that we all encounter theatre differently. Some audience members may react audibly, or laugh, or speak back to the stage. The card asks us not to shush our neighbors. It asks us to be generous with each other. Oh, that’s real, I think. In performing my solo version of Looking for Tiger Lily, I always notice generally whiter audiences take an…anthropological view. They’re very serious in how they view the work, quiet if not terrified, often with an expression suggesting a deer caught in headlights. My show’s a comedy, but one about tragedy, kind of like School Girls, and I assume they don’t know that it’s OK to laugh because they can’t directly empathize with my culturally specificity, let alone when it’s located so precariously near fragility-triggering issues like genocide and occupation. Native audiences, though, and queer-leaning ones lose their minds: they’re loud. They laugh. They scream. They snap and talk back. I see you. They’re two very different types of audiences, two very different cultures and worldviews. And now we’re both in the same room.

This insert is asking us to work toward a cultural equilibrium. We may be in White Portland, but there are plenty of people of color here, for a show that reflects them. Tonight at this show, your turf isn’t just your turf, in other words. A land acknowledgement at curtain even confirms that this was never your turf to begin with.

And tonight we’re all going to practice sharing it.

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The reading starts and I pull out my phone to take notes, ever the late-phase millennial. The first thing I notice is how funny this show is, and how fantastically these actors and their laughs commingle. When they start singing The Greatest Love of All as a group I feel like I’m a witness to a sleepover instead of a play rehearsal. Nobody can stop giggling. Then we’re introduced to a new character in the ensemble: light-skinned, American transplant Ericka – who the script eventually puts forward as the school’s candidate for Miss Ghana 1986 – and Head Mean Girl, the dark-skinned, Ghanaian Paulina asks her: “So. Are you a white?”

Eloise, the beauty queen from twenty years prior – somewhere between Grace Jones and a dignitary – is scouting the school for “girls that fall on the other end of the African skin spectrum” with the support of “big money,” and Ericka just might fit the ticket. She’s got the right look, is just Ghanaian enough, and this just got too real. I look to my phone. Twitter’s open – not because I’m waiting for the latest from the Orange Tweeter, but because, like any late-phase millennial, I chronically open and close the same apps over and over again as a nervous tick. I call it the App Loop. I follow Native Twitter – or Indian Twitter if you’re one of us – and I see a tweet designed to pit “white NDNs” against “brown NDNs.” Like most illusory discourse on the Internet, this statement deals in absolutes, in binaries, and is mean to validate one position while cancelling out the other: one is visible, one isn’t. One is Indian, the other isn’t.

“So. Are you a white?”

Colorism . It’s what this play is about.

Am I feeling triggered? Not at all. I only wrote a whole play about it: the sense of invisibility, of not measuring up, of not being real, invalid. Of walking down the street and being read as a white person because I inherited my mother’s skin tone (“But come on Anthony,” I think, “that means you can walk down the street safely, unlike so many others, so poor you, big whoop.”). It’s the whole reason I invented Carla Rossi – my drag clown ultimate form – to put on that toxicity, that projection, and lampoon it – to own it and hold myself accountable. But no matter how much I try to take it and laugh, I can never completely stop the poison from seeping down my ears and into my brain. Fragility, baby.

I look at Morgan Walker, who plays Ericka and channels her character’s letdown and insecurity on her face, and I see me. I look at Drea Vernae, who plays Paulina and channels her character’s disappointment and insecurity on her face, and I see my brothers – their dark skin, their long black hair, their upbringing and current homes on the Warm Springs Rez. They’ve been making music and touring for decades. Me? I’ve only been doing this for one, and I’ve already won mid-career-level awards, performed internationally, and happily taken so many opportunities that I know wouldn’t be offered to me if I looked less like me and more like them.

I can’t help but feel for Paulina, and I can’t help but feel for Ericka. Privilege is a problem. I believe a microphone, a play, an exhibition, a blog post, is a responsibility to honor and do right by those we came from, those who don’t have a microphone or an exhibition or an Internet following. It’s our duty to use our privilege to speak up for them and ultimately find them microphones and plays and exhibitions and followings. But the lateral pain – that dismissal, or that feeling of less-than, of enemy, of “oh god, was my friend subtweeting about me when she wrote that about Pretendians?” – still hurts. And it hurts just as much knowing it pays forward one hundred more times worse for our family that doesn’t have the passing privilege that makes us Other to ourselves.

It’s something racialized communities don’t know how to talk about. We’re still trying to figure it out. In the end, it’s all Colonialism, isn’t it? It’s all genocide. It’s everything and more that was insidiously intended to happen when science was perverted for the invention of race, so that the Overseer wouldn’t have to be the only one policing us—

—because eventually we’ll do it ourselves.

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Artists Rep appreciates the time and thoughtful commentary our Fresh Eyes volunteers Jim Mayer, Elizabeth Tavares and Mary Schmidt have shared during rehearsals for TEENAGE DICK, and hope that you have enjoyed their ‘fly on the wall’ observations of the process. Here are their final insights:

Jim Mayer

The first thing I noticed as I took my seat for the second preview performance was how much more room the actors had had in the rehearsal room.  I didn’t see any of the rehearsals on the stage, but I was impressed by how aware they had to be of economical movement on the more confining stage.

Experiencing the entire play after watching the rehearsals was a treat.  The addition of background sound gave the action a tempo that invigorated the play.  Auditorium scenes like the assemblies came alive not only due to the sound design, but also because the actors were so close to the audience.  Likewise with Richard’s soliloquies.  Also, it struck  me how much the real-time effect during performance sped up the action compared to rehearsal time.  The fight scene between Eddie and Richard, for example, was surprisingly quicker than I expected.

Speaking of time, apart from the ten minute pause due to the screen malfunction – and kudos to the person [Kristeen Crosser] who bravely brought out the ladder to manually raise the screens – the play came close to its advertised 95 minute run time.

Elizabeth Tavares

Young Richard in the city of Roses

 A rough sonnet upon the occasion of the west coast premiere of TEENAGE DICK, with allusions to Hans Holbein, William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Sufjan Stevens, and William Wellman

Exhumed from the grave, just don’t call him “Dick.”

Nor confuse his gait with that of pal, Buck:

She will the show steal, while he turns your trick.

Their passion and humor will leave you awestruck.

Still waters run deep for the girl that would dance.

Astrophil’s belov’d, made rather than born,

is great with child to speak, but unhelped Anne

holds her own under weight of tweets that scorn.

So wise so young, they say, do never live long:

a tragedy sparks hope when girlfriend grows

from ire, but no comedy blossoms from self-wrong.

If bloody thou art, bloody be thy close.

Hedgehog in the Rose city pricks not by

briar, but mirrors against us to vie.

The post Fresh Eyes on Teenage, 6th Installment first appeared on Artists Repertory Theatre.

ELIZABETH TAVARES

A Night at the Mirror Globe

EDWARD IV. Dazzle mine eyes, or do I see three suns?

RICHARD III. Three glorious suns, each one a perfect sun;
Not separated with the racking clouds,
But sever’d in a pale clear-shining sky.
See, see! they join, embrace, and seem to kiss,
As if they vow’d some league inviolable:
Now are they but one lamp, one light, one sun.
In this the heaven figures some event.

EDWARD IV. ‘Tis wondrous strange, the like yet never heard of.
—   William Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI

Play, find, experiment, explore: these are the most common words used by actors and directors when talking about their process. In a day like today, when the ideas bounce off the concrete, the reality looks more like mend, fix, solve. That seems to me to be very much in the spirit of Richard III, a technologically complex play in its day. It brought to a close four plays William Shakespeare revised into a coherent set for the newly upgraded open-air playhouses of London. It also included a special mechanism to show three rotating suns descending as if from heaven.

The sun metaphor crucially prophesizes that while the three sons of York (Edward, George, and Richard) work together, they can keep the English throne. According to the first two lines of Shakespeare’s play, it seems to work: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” The York boys’ discontents are abetted in this time of success. But it is in “this weak piping time of peace” in which Richard cannot participate, “not shaped for sportive tricks, / Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass,” nor amble in, say, a high school dance. Where the sun was a sign of success, now, should he “spy my shadow in the sun,” Richard needs a distraction from it, lest he “descant (read: think too hard) on mine own deformity.”

The three suns descending down from the ceiling of the Globe theatre would have made a miraculous sight. In TEENAGE DICK, the descent of a mirror ball above a basketball hoop produces equal delight. In this first week of the new year, the disco tech seems fresh from Auld Lang duty and provides a quick sense of double nostalgia for recent parties as well as the dances of our adolescence.

All of the visual spectacles are quickly coming together for the production, which was exciting to see as actors Kailey Rhodes and Chris Imbrosciano (Anne and Richard) moved through their paces to get the design to serve the needs of the story. While no characters are doubled, as would have been typical of the sixteenth century, major stage elements are. The dance studio in which characters reflect on themselves and refract on one another is also the halls of an urban Portland secondary school and, later, its cafetorium. Simple black curtains cover butter-colored tiles to become a dance studio, and the gymnasium risers rotate to become full-length mirrors against which to measure a pirouette. These create spaces of both literal discovery for the audience and metaphorical discovery for the characters.

The calm, quiet sleepiness of a Friday morning after a holiday week was broken when one of the many design folks, all nestled in the NASA-styled bay of desks set into seats, called out “sound!” The theatre was split open by breathy R&B laced with deep pulses of Dubstep. When the lights went down, the “fun-o-meter just went up” exclaimed director Josh Hecht.

It was the kind of beat perfect for a wood floor like a basketball court, making the same pleasurable wobble and lift of a show at the Crystal Ballroom and sending just the right speed of vibration up the spine as if you’re humming with the spheres. The treacly throw-away monotony of song-of-summer lyrics like “Tonight is the night is the night” are intended to cultivate a sense of YOLO desperation to fuel conspicuous consumption (“poppin’ bottles in the club”) when hyperbolically escalating the significance of an otherwise ordinary Saturday at the bar. Yet these lyrics are utterly perfect for this play matching the desperation of its truly daring catharsis comprised of a sequence of decisions after which none of the characters are the same again.

All the spectacular elements of this play, including sound, light, and design, are now working together, starting to reveal one of the crucial questions the production hopes to ask. They suggest there is more at stake during a Sadie Hawkins dance than the platitudes about high school—“teenagers think they are invincible” or “graduating high school isn’t an accomplishment”—try to otherwise allay. We live in hope that no high school moment was, in fact, “the time of our life.” What happens when it is?

MARY SCHMIDT

After missing what seemed like a crucial week of rehearsals during Christmas week, I made it in to see some of the last-minute rehearsal work in the theater on Sunday afternoon, with the play to preview that evening. After reading fellow Fresh Eyes folks’ write-ups about the week I missed, I realized my perspective here is still very limited, since I had never (and have yet) to witness any rehearsals of the “fight scene,” which sounds quite intense; I’m a little worried about how I will feel watching that violent scene live, to be honest. Again, I am coming in with very little sympathy for Richard because I have not seen demonstrations showing his vulnerability or weaknesses. (Furthermore, I think I said I had never read RICHARD III, but I also meant that I am not familiar with this historical story or these characters; no idea what characters I am “supposed” to root for or sympathize with. I also purposely only re-read the TEENAGE DICK script once since the initial read-through, figuring I could give more valuable feedback as someone who might see the play without any prior familiarity with it.)

When I walked in, multiple people were behind desks attached to theater chair backs. They were fine tuning lighting during the dance at the gym (first time I’ve seen this set on the stage!) and also finalizing sound effects. Stage Manager Karen Hill had a desk set up, but was moving around the theater for most of the time I was there. At first, it was a lot of silence with lighting people trying out different brightnesses and features, and then periodically Director Hecht piping up, “sound” and someone playing a sound clip (background murmuring, laughing, boos, etc). I have no idea how the sound people knew what sound Hecht was asking for each time, as some seemed intended for the debate scene and some seemed intended for the dance scene, but their screens had long lists of files and they referred to sound clips just by number when they referred to them. A brief discussion about one person lacking sound file 666 on their computer occurred, so it seems like there had been several iterations of sound effect files and people were making sure they had the final, decided-upon, files. I couldn’t tell if the clips of students laughing or murmuring were recorded from this play’s actors or not. In one “crowd noise” clip, I thought I recognized “Eddie’s” voice, but that didn’t make sense because it seemed to be a clip from the debate scene. So, for a while there, I was just confused and trying to take things in.

The lighting person I sat next to (I’m sorry, I don’t know who it was; I probably wouldn’t have otherwise, but the dark theater made it even more uncertain) worked on creating collages of tweets in the “tweet storm,” as people casually referred to it. He was making a collage of how the tweets would show up in quick succession and eventually end up like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle completely covering the backdrop screen. I guess the direction here is that the tweets will show up both on the backdrop as well as on the stage. I’m not sure if actors will be on the stage when the projected tweets are projected on the stage floor, with them bathed in the tweet mob’s lighted words (which would then be quite illegible, but probably still distinguishable as lights shaped as words). That could be intriguing or confusing; either could work, I guess. I feel like at this point, people were doing fine tuning of specific details I don’t know about that happened in previous discussions. So, I would say, I still was not able to see what the final vision is going to look like come show time. I am in for plenty of surprises on Tuesday night, both stage/set-wise and also I will finally see something that might make me feel sympathy toward Richard, with the fight scene.

The bits of actor-involved rehearsal I saw were during the debate, which was one of the same scenes I saw on my last observation. One thing that was fun to see was that the female actors seemed to be having a more lively time during and between scenes. I was right in the back row, and Ramirez (Clarissa) all of a sudden was there ready to come in for her part during the debate. She struck me as full of energy. Later between takes, I could hear Ramirez and Rhodes (Anne) sharing a quiet laugh together just outside the theater. Berkshire (Elizabeth) did some clowning around on stage during discussions between takes while lighting people were doing what looked like calibrations of projection placements, and they reminded her jovially that it wasn’t exactly helping; her clowning wasn’t so much a distraction, but more a reminder of the energy change in the room; they would perform in just a few hours. I don’t know if the other actors had a similar elevation in energy level since they were near the stage. Ferrucci (Eddie) looked completely different than he had in rehearsals I had seen him in, where he had a beard (which I figured out was for a role in Third Rail’s production of Annie Baker’s John – which I saw on its last performance night I think during Week 2 of TD rehearsals). Clean shaven, he looked much younger and like the stereotypical “jock” in high school. He actually looked a lot like a particular “jock” guy I went to high school with (who was not a very nice person :D).

I was surprised that, on the first night with an audience, such significant details as to how Imbrosciano should posture himself at certain points in the debate, whether directing his speech to Eddie/Elizabeth or facing and directing the statements toward the audience, were still being worked out. I’m not sure if this production is somewhat more compressed than usual due to the development occurring during “the holidays,” which tend to mess up everyone’s schedule/equilibrium regardless of how little they choose to participate in this weird collective “mess up everyone’s schedule/equilibrium” period of time at the end of the year, or whether these types of details may still be lingering on first preview night for other productions also.

Even seeing some of the behind the scenes work, I still will have plenty of surprises awaiting me when I see the play on Tuesday night. I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of the sets and lighting plans as well as to see how the whole play comes together and whether my initial impressions of characters and themes are reinforced or whether I will have a different take seeing the play as one continuous, finalized piece. Thanks again to ART for the opportunity to see how a play evolves from table to stage.

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