Wit. Chapter Three.

Tomorrow is press night.  I'm actually pretty stoked.  I think the show is coming together nicely.  And this is coming from a very superstitious theatre person who would normally not say positive things about a show before opening - or at least not quite THIS positive, but I honestly think I have had my fair share of stress thus far this time.

I have also had a very hard time "letting go and letting God."  I know that all my shows pretty much suck unless I allow God to just take over.  I know this, and yet I always still attempt to control everything myself and then end up having a complete panic attack...  okay... several complete panic attacks. 

But...  God is in control.  I will continue to repeat that until I believe it.  Not sure if there is any other way....

Aside from all of this, I am having a very hard time with some of the people on my production staff when it comes to authority.  All of them men.

I am not one of those feminists who hates men.  In fact, I like them a lot.  For much of my life, I preferred their company to that of other women.  For much of my life, I actually thought that women were very annoying and petty and completely uninteresting.  I remember going to this sleepover during this period where I thought that being popular was really important (this will be the subject of another blog, I am certain) and so I decided that I would concentrate on making myself popular, and after I succeeded, and went to a sleepover with the popular girls, I realized that it was perhaps the most boring and horrible decision of my life.  I couldn't believe that they actually talked about the things they were talking about.  It was like a poorly written teenie bopper film.  They literally spent the night talking about make-up and shopping and really stupid boys.  I eventually went upstairs and hung out with the girl's older brother and his friend. 

So, in light of all of that, I have never been one who really felt like I was all oppressed and disrespected by men.  There have been times when I've been upset or felt like I was treated as less than, but never so much as the times during this show.

I'm not going to name names because this is a very public blog, but it's really hard for me to deal with, to be honest.  I have trouble asserting myself when the need to do so comes out of nowhere.

I wish that I could be one of those women who is always prepared for exactly that sort of thing and had an arsenal of stuff to throw back at questionings of ability and insults to your intellect, but alas, I am not, so I've just walked around dismayed.

It would be different if it were about something I thought I sucked at.  I would pretty much just take whatever was dished out to me and agree with them sadly.  But when they question my vision for a show I'm directing, I really just want to punch them in the teeth.  And when they question my knowledge about how to run a rehearsal, I really just want to stab them with a hard, but blunt object.  Like a screwdriver.

Perhaps it isn't became I'm female, but moreso because this is my first time directing in the space.  Not sure.  I will say that I have had no trouble of this nature from the women involved.  Maybe it's because my head is shaved and so I fall into that category where I might be able to be viewed as a man.  I've been thinking about this a lot, especially today when a guy at Walmart who was putting away shopping carts asked Michael and me if we were out Mother's Day shopping for our wives.  I stared blankly and hoped he would figure out that I was, in fact female.

Granted, I was wearing my Dublin soccer jacket, which I admit I bought in the men's section, but I was also wearing my yoga pants and black Nike running shoes with a pink swoosh.

It was one of those times I really wished I had bigger boobs.

Wit. Chapter Two.

I am at a harrowing place for a director.  Just under three weeks until we open.  It is a time of panic. 

It is also a time of reflection.

Today I was thinking about auditions and mulling over my choices. 

I always do this about now.  I look back.  I try to picture other people in the roles.  It never fails.  I can't do it.  The choices were right.  They just were.

There are times as a director when I wish that I could cast a certain person because I like them personally or because I have worked with them before and know that they are talented and I want to work with them again.  Regardless, at auditions I always try very hard to go in with a clean slate and my choices are inevitably different than what I believed they would be before I entered the theatre on the day. 

Today was a looking back day much like this.  I thought through everything and I realized that I am very much enrapt with this particular cast.  I enjoy working with them very much.  Things have very nicely fallen into place.

Yesterday we had an excellent rehearsal. I feel like we're locking in.  The timing is perfect. 

This is terrifying. 

Something will go wrong - I need to accept this.

I also need to accept that this show is not mine.

This is the panic thing I was talking about before.  I always panic, have a nervous breakdown, and then realize that it's pretty prideful of me to think that I'm doing any of this on my own.  That whole directing gift, the whole opportunity - it's really all a God thing, in the end. 

So after my nervous breakdown, I give it up to the Big Guy and things start to go much better.  Ultimately, I am not in control.  I do not wield unending power.  I am merely human.  Given something to use here.  Trusted with that something.  But God owns the show - not me.

Typing it is good therapy.  It reminds me that none of this is really personal. 

I look back on shows from the past of which I am particularly proud and I realize that I really shouldn't be.

I remember a time, sitting backstage crying hysterically during Once Upon a Mattress.  One of my best pieces, I think, and I remember having that breakdown and throwing things and screaming about how nothing was going right and then I gave it up.  I had to.  The stress was killing me.  And once God takes over I can just sit back and go along for the ride. 

It's that way for this show too.  I've stopped taking it personally.

Let's hope I can get through tech weekend with that knowledge intact fully.

Wit. Chapter One.

"Hi, how are you feeling today?"

This is the first line of the piece I'm currently directing for the Newtowne Players.  I used it as the opener for this blog post at the request of my leading actress, Dawna Diaz.  I hope she doesn't mind my mentioning her here.  I am almost certain I will be saying only good things with regard to her personally - and professionally, I might add.

It was not my intention to direct this piece.

I submitted it for a friend, who now happens to be my stage manager, but when he couldn't direct it, he asked me to step in, having seen my work before.  I said yes instantly, because I wanted to see the piece done on the Newtowne stage - for the Newtowne audience.  I felt like they were ready for it and that they needed this nudge off of the artistic cliff so to speak - nurtured toward more after last year's Butterfly experience.

That and the piece is brilliant.  Not only is it a Pulitzer winner but it's also stunning, intelligent, pushes the envelope...  I guess what I'm trying to say is, while some plays that win the Pulitzer could be said to be lacking something...this play simply isn't lacking anything.  It is edgy.  It is humorous and terribly sad - sometimes together.  And the main character is a woman.

This has happened for good old Pulitzer a few times, and I have been privy to it before: Proof, by David Auburn, is another example of such a piece.  I had the privilege to direct the show on the high school stage and then, that same season, to play the role of Catherine. 

But I digress.  Wit is the piece at hand.

It is the story of a woman who is diagnosed with advanced metastatic ovarian cancer  - stage four.  "There is no stage five."  She checks herself into a research hospital, and she tells us, the audience - her students for just under two hours - exactly what happens to her along the way.

I see the piece as a Last Lecture of sorts.

What I find most intriguing is that Vivian, the main character - who speaks openly to the audience - shattering the fourth wall with her very first statement - while suffering from a female cancer, could be any of us.  I find this breathtaking.

There is no man to whom she clings for her salvation.  She is not having sexual relations "at the moment".  She is utterly alone in the world and she is successful in that way - and it is another woman who teaches her the art of kindness - the art of compassion - and really - how could it be any other way.

I applaud everything about this piece.

I admit that I am terrified of it still - even though we are just a few short weeks from opening night.

The night after I agreed to direct it I went home and had a complete panic attack.  I will be directing Wit.  What have I done?  This piece is too good for me.  It is too big.  It is too rich.  It is about things I don't understand - medical terms... I am...I will be...in over my head.

Wit is my twentieth directing gig.  I still feel like a novice in the face of it.  In my desperation to do it justice I am certain that I have taken on much more stress than necessary.  It is, after all, only art.

Of course I don't mean that.  It is only art.  But art to me...is something like breathing.  It's where I find God.  In art.  In His art.  Creation.  The gifts he has bestowed on others.

It is why I strive for excellence in this area of my life more than any other.  Because for me, it is a practice of holiness.

Some might find this blasphemous - but I think that other artists - other actors, dancers, painters, directors, musicians... I think that they will understand what I mean when I say that there is no where else I am closer to God than when I am surrounded by brilliance in an art museum - surrounded by our attempts to be like our Master.  Our futile attempts - but there is beauty in that.  Sheer, utter, complex beauty.  I am choking up thinking about it.

I know I am unnaturally sentimental.

Regardless - I am blessed with a most excellent cast, and things are going so well I'm afraid for the other foot to fall.  I pray that there is no other foot, and I am in fact dueling with a one-legged man.

A poem today.

I wrap my legs around cotton shades of obtuse shapes and torn out memories
Scrapbook pages
Leafing through them
Unhealthy
But it flashes through your brick walled memory like battering rams
And you are powerless to stop it.

Thinking back through pages of black and white composition books:
Symmetrical poetry about beauty and rapture and disgust covered in white snow -
Like forgiveness but soot-ed and grey;
My eye lashes smooth my tear-encrusted cheeks:

Soul fly. 
My soul flies over bridges and across mountaintops while my body sits idly in the middle of a
sun-drenched room.
I feel the warmth on my skin but it does not change the fact that I am alone.
Still covered.  Cotton.  Choking.
I want to tear it free,
To push it away with crimson hot anger
But I cannot.
I embrace it
and allow the suffocation to comfort me.


Today it is bright and sunny and almost seventy degrees outside.  It is a beautiful, gorgeous, wonderful day.  I am...  here. 

March is in full bloom, full sway.  I feel the way the poem says, above.  Melancholy and...  not numb yet...something in between full, heavy emotion and nothingness. 

I want to write about it so that others can understand what is happening to me.  Inside my head.  With my body right now.  There is so much to write about. 

The choking feeling - like I want to cry over nothing. 

I am currently directing a play called W;t, by Margaret Edson.  I really should write about the process, about the piece, about the actors and actresses with whom I am working...  but right now, there is this line.  Vivian is in pain.  She is dying from ovarian cancer and she is trying to describe the pain that she feels.  She says "I want to tell you how it feels.  I want to use my words..."  but she cannot.  It escapes her. 

I know that I am not dying of cancer. But I think that depression...  I think that SAD and all other forms of depression are things that not many people who haven't experienced them really understand.  I want to use my words to tell you how it feels.