A Midsummer Night's Dream

Performance Date: 06.16.10
Mortal Folly Theatre

A Midsummer Nights’ Dream is many people’s first experience with Shakespeare, and it was an early one of mine. In third grade, the sixth graders mounted a production of Midsummer, and I remember Bottom, transfigured with the head of an ass, entering the scene in which Titania falls in love with him. He was humming the theme song from “The Smurfs” and we all thought that was hysterical.

In later years, I myself appeared in two productions of Midsummer. The first production was the first play I was in since elementary school; I was a junior in high school and I played one of Hippolyta’s attendants, a non-speaking role. My costume was basically a green satin bag belted by some copper mesh with matching mesh wristbands. It was hot. I sat on a platform, along with my fellow green-satin attendant, trying to look catlike and unapproachable.

The second Midsummer was also a first -- my first show as an officially aspiring actress, about a year after taking my first acting class. I was twenty-four and I played Hermia wearing a private school uniform. Also hot. My favorite part was launching myself at Helena in the big lovers’ quarrel and I was challenged by the nightmare Hermia has just before she wakes to discover Lysander absconded. I had trouble pretending to be asleep while fighting an imaginary snake and speaking in verse. Ah, the early days.

These days most of my peers profess to have had their fill of Midsummer, but I think it is secretly a favorite play for many of them. Yes it lends itself to hokey insincerity – all that frolicking with Mustardseed in the wood – but it also holds within it a potential energy that I feel could rock me to my primal core, if only a single production could unleash it. In this dream Dream of mine, Oberon and Titania are thunderstorms of sexuality and Nature. The lovers radiate a hormonal heat that fuels their explosiveness in love, lust, and jealousy, and yet they remain uncorrupted by cynicism. Puck possesses a kinetic mystery, the fairies are both flighty and frightening, and the Mechanicals are pathetic, in the very best sense, and hilarious. It’s hard to imagine getting all of that, plus superbly handled language, plus fearsome displays of physicality, plus amazing sound, lights, and design – all essential elements in my dream Dream – together in a single show, particularly in today’s theater climate of scare resources. And thus I feel my dream Dream will always be a dream. But I plan to keep a look out.

As an aside, I feel I should mention here the 1970 Peter Brook production of Midsummer, which of course I’ve never seen, not even on tape, as recordings are very rare if they exist at all. I’ve not yet truly read up on that piece of theater history either, but its legend – as passed down in lore by the participants, or by authors and mentors who saw it firsthand – hangs over me like a tremendous specter, vainglorious and painfully out of reach. It’s infuriating that something so monumental and groundbreaking, that inspired so many legions of theater professionals and patrons throughout the world, happened five years before I was born. It’s like arriving to a party and learning that JFK, John Lennon, and Jesus just left.

At any rate. This is all to say that someone at Mortal Folly Theatre seems to have a similar dream Dream to my own. I saw and felt the intention for nearly all of my Midsummer wishes present on their stage, and the intention crystallized for me in some very memorable moments. Our first moments with Puck, for example – the sprite zipping about the stage as if made of lightening, pounding on the earth as an invocation, then leaping and freezing into a sort of crouching handstand to listen with an ear to the ground. Or the lovers, whose incredibly high-energy, knock-down brawl went farther and longer than any I’d ever seen. Or the live music, played by a cellist with a laptop, creating a depth of atmosphere that gave the giant tree tattoo across Oberon’s back a sort of tribal power. These moments, reflecting as they did my own Dream, made me feel recognized. And with each one, it was as though a little place in me sighed in relief and let go. In fact, if I remember correctly, I left the theater a little more relaxed than I entered it. Just another amazing thing that this art form can do.

Fences

Performance Date: 06.11.10
Cort Theatre

Let’s get the celebrity stuff out of the way first. I saw Fences the weekend before the Tony’s with a friend who knows someone in the cast. After the show, we waited in the alley behind the stage door gate to say hello. There we were had a funny exchange with fellow backstage visitor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was not recognized by security and had to wait in the alley with us peons (he was cool about it), and were charmed by Denzel Washington who goofed with us while waiting for his cue to exit onto the barricaded street. Now, do you remember how once upon a blog I confessed that I find famous people (and Philip Seymour Hoffman in particular) shiny? Well allow me to update you: Philip Seymour Hoffman is still shiny, even up close and personal. Denzel has degrees of shininess – least shiny in person, next shiniest on stage, ultra-uber-ohmygod shiny two days later on television when I actually gasped and did a little involuntary seated-hop on my friend’s loveseat watching him on the Tony’s. I’m not proud of this last bit of information. Sometimes I think I was created in a lab by scientists.

Speaking of the Tony's...  Did Fences deserve to win Best Revival? Yes. Though View from the Bridge deserved it just as well. Did Denzel deserve Best Actor? Yes. And Liev would have deserved it too. Did Viola deserve Best Actress? Oh hell yes. Though I didn’t see any plays starring her fellow nominees. What do I think about Hollywood invading Broadway and taking all our jobs and prizes? Ah, interesting. If I became a famous movie star tomorrow, I would use my new celebrity status to enable my Broadway debut in a heartbeat. So I’m not going to say Hollywood should stay away just because I’m on the other side of it. But it is true that the commercialization of theater, and the resulting movie-and-TV-stars-on-stage phenomenon, has had a huge negative impact on my profession. There are simply fewer jobs for the non-famous, which trickles down to make competition at even the lowliest levels tougher than ever. That sucks big time. But whaddya gonna do? I don’t see the trend changing any time soon. So we will adapt. I don’t know how, nor how many careers will be abandoned in the meantime, but we will adapt. It’s the only way.

Finally, let's get to some Fences stuff. What I will remember:

-- Viola Davis’s body in a sudden, violent spasm as her character digests some devastating news. Oh my god, woman. Work. (For the uninitiated of my parents’ generation, “work” is a positive remark, derived from “work it” or “work it, girl,” commonly used in response to a person literally or metaphorically strutting one’s stuff on the catwalk.)

-- Chris Chalk’s kinetic leaping about the set as the adolescent Cory – an apt choice that, in addition to conveying his character’s youth, connected him physically to his surroundings and conveyed a sense of belonging to the home and yard around him.

-- Stephen McKinley Henderson anchoring the stage with grounded energy at the top of the show, when both Denzel and the applauding audience are forced to cope with the magnitude of Denzel’s stardom.

-- Finally Denzel Washington, who balanced an honest compassion for and honest judgment of his character, Troy Maxton, in Troy’s most unlikeable moments of the play. A less rigorous actor would be tempted to win the audience’s approval, either by evoking sympathy for Troy or subtly conveying a personal condemnation of him. Denzel does neither. His performance in those moments remains consistent with his portrayal elsewhere, and in this way he allows the complexity of August Wilson’s protagonist to shine through.

Everyday Rapture

Performance Date: 06.02.10

American Airlines Theatre

Everyday Rapture was completely up my alley.  I wanted to take Sherie Rene Scott home with me in my pocket.   A little pocket-sized, funny, utterly charming, sprite-like, adorable, self-deprecating, Broadway semi-star (her words) to pull out at work and put on my desk so she can sing Mister Rogers and Judy Garland songs and keep me company in my cubicle.  And then I can gaze upon her tiny sparkling eyes and her bouncy long hair, and make her tell me again about growing up half-Mennonite in Topeka and meeting a magician at the TKTS booth on her first trip to New York City.  And she can skip about the tiny stage I will make for her out of post-it notes and my paper clip caddy and her presence will remind me of four-leaf clovers and confetti.  It will be our little secret here in this grey office building in Midtown and my days here will pass like easy water flowing in a green-banked brook. 

Not that I’m writing my blog at work.

Everyday Rapture is an autobiographical one-woman musical that does indeed feature Mister Rogers, Judy Garland, four leaf clovers, and magic.  But it’s also an honest story about paradox, about struggling to move forward in life when your world view contains a vital contradiction that holds you in place – which, if you think about it, is probably something to which you can relate.  It’s one of those great, personal pieces of theater that works because the more specific someone gets in describing the truth of his or her life, the easier it is for someone listening to identify.  

Many times in the show, as she’s telling her life story, Sherie Rene Scott would have these moments where she looked like she was figuring something out.  A hesitation coupled with a puzzled frown.  A glance away followed by an intake of breath.  Those moments endeared her to me.  They made her story accessible to me.  Because in that hesitation and frown, in that glance away, I immediately recognized the quiet focus that comes over you when an important realization is just on the edge of your consciousness.  And in the intake of breath, I recognized the dawning of that realization.  I more than recognized these things.  I felt them.  I felt them with her.  And when that sort of thing happens, then this one woman’s specific, unique story of growing up half-Mennonite in Topeka lives in me for a moment.  It becomes my story, and the story of the person sitting next to me, and the story of the person sitting next to him.  Specific becomes universal.  Entertainment becomes personal.   

What’s interesting to me is that while those moments of realization were absolutely magical to me as an audience member, as an actor I also recognized them as technique.  In fact, I’m willing to bet that Sherie Rene Scott has those exact same moments of realization, with those exact expressions and movements, every evening, in every performance, at exactly the same points in the show.  Which doesn’t mean she’s faking it, by the way.  When you’re good – meaning you know exactly what you’re doing and you have strong access to your emotions – you can replicate a physical gesture day in, day out and honest emotion will come to you every (or nearly every) time.  Maybe not at 100% intensity, but it will come.

I think what I might be talking about here – both with my reaction to Sherie Rene Scott and with the ability to replicate moments of emotion on stage – is empathy.  The physical mechanics of empathy.  As in, you see in my face and body a pattern.  Your body subconsciously mirrors that pattern and recognizes it as one associated with a certain emotion.  You then feel that emotion.  So, by looking at me, you can know what I’m feeling.  (I don't know if that's exactly how it works but it sounds plausible, yes?)  So, in this way, I look at Sherie Rene Scott’s frown, glance, and breath and empathize her feeling of discovery.  And Sherie Rene Scott, looking back at some former moment in her life, mirrors the frown, glance, and breath of that moment, and she too experiences that feeling of discovery.  She empathizes with some past image of herself. 

Is that what acting is?  Empathizing with some past or imagined image of yourself?  Hm.  Well it’s an incomplete picture, to say the least.  But it’s a notion I like nonetheless.

Three Sisters Come and Go

Performance Date: 05.19.10
TheaterLab

I am writing this near out of my mind with sleeplessness and jetlag, so I beg your pardon if I am a tad incoherent. I had a really fun and restful time at home in SF for Memorial Day, but our flight was delayed coming back to NYC last night and I’m running on fumes. I used to bounce back easier than this.

I wanted to see Three Sisters Come and Go because the description on TDF sounded very similar to an idea my friends Gwynne, Leslie and I have long considered for a future collaboration; namely, to use Chekhov’s Three Sisters as a point of departure for an original piece for three actresses. In the case of TheaterLab, they also added Samuel Beckett’s Come and Go into the mix.

This in itself makes me think of the notion people sometimes have of, Hey they stole my idea, to which the proper response is usually, Nah, they didn’t. I’m a big believer, effectively if not literally, in the collective unconscious. We all share the same world with the same data in it, so it can’t be much of a stretch for the same idea to arise independently and simultaneously in multiple locations. And in this instance, conceiving an original piece for three women based on Three Sisters isn’t all that unusual an idea to begin with.

Perhaps the idea is not unusual, but that doesn’t make it unworthy. I love reimaginings, reconfigurations, and retellings. And from here my brain splits in three directions:

1)    I love reimaginings, reconfigurations, and retellings. And I especially love when several people reimagine, reconfigure, and retell the same material, much as I love when TV food competitions instruct chefs to cook a meal of their own devising out of the exact same list of ingredients. The fun is in seeing what different individuals will do with the same stuff, and the fascination is in learning who those individuals are, or wish to be, through the choices they make.

[Sound of needle scratching off the record…]

2)    I love reimaginings, reconfigurations, and retellings. And in this day and age, it seems I should add “remixes” and “mash-ups” to that list of words, but for some reason I hesitate to do so. I guess because, to my mind, remixes and mash-ups are less artful forms that rely too heavily on juxtaposition to make their new contributions. (That probably offends some great mash-up artist out there, and I welcome him/her to make a rebuttal.) Juxtaposition – even unconscious or random juxtapositions – can be brilliantly effective, but I feel they work best as a spice not as the main dish.

[Sound of needle scratching off the record…]

3)    I love reimaginings, reconfigurations, and retellings. It is a very human act. We are constantly absorbing narratives from others and emitting them anew as our own. My favorite example of this is when I tell a long, funny story from my life and then close with the sincere realization that it actually happened to my sister. Less trivially, absorbing and emitting narratives is probably how we learn to feel less alone (by connecting ourselves to something larger, or to someone else) as well as more unique (by differentiating ourselves from the existing narrative by adding our own particular spin).

And now, in an effort to find some cohesion for these splintered thoughts and my jet-lagged brain, I’ll return to Three Sisters Come and Go. I enjoyed witnessing what these particular artists contributed to the narratives of Olga, Irina, and Masha, particularly because my own brain has spent so much time considering what I would contribute myself. The juxtapositions of “theirs” and “mine” probably fed the creative process for my future collaboration much more than seeing the Chekhov again would have done. I wonder if, in this way, we are all co-authors of some bigger collaboration, to which Chekhov and TheaterLab and, someday Gwynne, Leslie, and Anna, are all contributing a draft. Perhaps that’s what collective unconscious truly is – the all-encompassing narrative of human existence.  We can all tap into it because we all absorb and emit it on a daily basis. Whoa. That got really deep just there. Brilliance or jet-lag? You decide.

City of Angels

Performance Date: 05.16.10
The Gallery Players

This is killing me.  I’ve had this blog post half-written for about a week now but had to scrap the whole thing because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to finish it.  And I had some lines in there I really liked.  Like how I’m not really a connoisseur of musical theater, and how that statement will come as a surprise to my boyfriend.  And how I love singing, in general, and singing in unison especially, and singing with FEELING molto especially, but that makes me a fan not a connoisseur. (I particularly liked the “molto especially.”)  And even though I’m cleverly getting those lines in here in this new post, it’s not the same. Context is everything.

This is not a case of me floundering for something to write because I didn’t actually like the show.  That has happened before, but not this time.  I really liked City of Angels.  It’s a smart musical about a writer in 1940’s Los Angeles who is trying to adapt his detective novel into a screenplay.  While he struggles with how much to compromise his artistic integrity on the road to fame and fortune, we also watch the plot of his film noir, narrating-gumshoe story unfold before us.  While both these narratives progress pretty much the way you think they would, the interplay between them – how his real life affects his adaptation and vice versa – creates a suspense that keeps you engaged throughout.  Add to that a pretty much flawless cast and a complex, jazz-inspired score, and I was thoroughly charmed.

No, I floundered on my earlier draft because I was trying to write about “smart writing” and I wrote myself into a corner, which wasn't very smart.  Basically, I had no choice but to define what constitutes “smart writing” and connect City of Angels to AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, and the Pulitzer Prize winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  I’d bitten off more than I could chew.

All I really wanted to point out is that it is so satisfying to encounter good, smart writing these days.  It’s almost vindicating: Yes! Thank you! Thank you, [insert author of well-written work]. Thank you for being out there fighting the good fight.  Because there is so much bad writing out there.  Or perhaps more accurately, there is just so much writing out there period – movies, TV, news editorials, niche-cable shows, faux-reality series, magazines, webisodes, blogs, blog aggregators, tweets, vampire young adult fiction with poor female role models – and the law of averages makes the majority of it, well, average.  Dutiful consumer that I am, I absorb a ton of this mediocrity on a daily basis (the diet starts tomorrow), so when I encounter a morsel that is well-crafted and considered, or that takes risks and trusts its audience, it makes me want to dunk a basketball and hang from the rim or something.  Tackle a teammate and pound his helmet into the ground.  Rip my jersey off and let loose a primal scream in my sports bra.  That kind of thing.

City of Angels gave me a bit of that feeling.  Not at first, when we were just setting up the two worlds and alternating back and forth, but a little later, when the storylines began to twist into their double-helix.  That’s when I started sitting up in my chair, leaning forward and watching closely.  Like my dog Gabby used to when I’d hide in the pantry with the dog treats and she knew a biscuit would shortly come sliding out from under the door.  That’s when I started to marvel at a film noir musical that could satisfy every last genre expectation but still manage to keep its audience guessing.  It’s not easy to do that.  It takes effort.  And smarts.  Just as it takes effort and smarts to write a television show that has never once backed away from the dares it sets itself on a weekly basis (“Breaking Bad”), or a novel with a narrative voice so unapologetically specific it must have made some weak-hearted publishing exec quake with the fear of leaving audiences behind (Oscar Wao).

These are the folks that are fighting the good fight out there, be they battles large or small.  You know of many others who are doing the same.  Tell me about them.  And I’ll tell my friends.  And then we can all bum rush the field and pour Gatorade on each other and weep with the relief of having endured a very long season of proliferating mediocrity in popular culture.  Sigh.  Like I said, the diet starts tomorrow.

The Subject Was Roses

Performance Date: 05.08.10

Pearl Theatre Company, NY City Center, Stage 2

I hate being late.  But increasingly, I find it happening, usually when my vanity has gotten the better of me and I find myself changing clothes multiple times instead of running out the door.  But I am rarely, rarely ever late for the theater.  And yet there I am, hopping into a cab in Chelsea at 1:52, trying to make it to 55th and 6th in midday traffic for a 2pm curtain.  Wishful thinking.

After slinking into the very intimate space, where The Subject Was Roses is 15 minutes into its first act, I very smartly decide not to cross the theater to my ticketed seat.  Instead, I quickly try to make myself as small as possible on a step near the door, freezing my body into perfect stillness and training a laser-like focus of concentration upon the stage.  I am hoping this will convince those around me that I am actually a deeply respectful theater-going patron rather than an ill-mannered lout.

The usher who was kind enough to let me in, however, decides I look pathetic down there and tries to direct me to some empty seats in the middle of the back row.  Loath to attract more attention by climbing over folks to sit down, I shoo the usher away, trying to convey silently that I’m a-okay here on the floor.  He thinks maybe I don’t understand, and laughingly tries to point me to an actual seat.  I shoo him again, but now we’ve made a bit of a scene, which causes some nice people to slide over a few spots in their row so I can take a seat on the aisle – which I do, sheepishly, but with great relief.  The step it turns out was not very comfortable, and Darwin clearly did not bestow me with great powers of camouflage.

With the lateness ordeal behind me, I can finally pay attention to the play.  Within moments I notice that I feel very comforted, as if someone has just served me a good portion of a nice, homemade stew.  I realize that it has been a long while since I have seen a production this…traditional, is it?  Classic?  I’m not sure of the term.  The set is detailed and realistically appointed – a mid 1940’s kitchen and living room – but it’s a thrust stage in a small space, so my field of vision is equally divided between the stage and the audience surrounding it.  I don’t know why but this juxtaposition feels comforting to me.  Perhaps because the two realities – the fictional one on-stage and the actual one around it – are so starkly divided.  Unabashedly divided.  There is no attempt to soften the transition between the two.  It's the 1940's kitchen complete with parqueted floor on one side, and row A seats 101-115 on the other.  In the foreground, it's a World War II era mother resting her evening bag on the divan while pulling on her tailored overcoat, and behind her a tourist sitting in shorts and knee socks with an umbrella and two shopping bags at his feet.   Two realities, starkly divided.  No attempt to soften the transition between the two. 

Ah yes, that's it.  It's not postmodern, this presentation.  It's not trying to break the fourth wall in any way, in either performance or design.  There's no attempt to demonstrate that we-know-that-you-know-that-we-know that this is theater here.  No effort made to confirm or deny that we are all suspending our collective disbelief.  It just is what it is.  We’re putting on a play and you’re watching it.  No need to get clever, no need to get conceptual.  We all know what the situation is, so why monkey around?  It's a choice that makes perfect sense for this play, and yet I'm surprised how good it feels to witness.  How comforting and familiar...yet startling and unfamiliar too.  Like seeing an old school chum after a very long time.  It's strange for something so...old fashioned, is it?...to feel so...refreshing.

I guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise.  Postmodernism is kind of played out, isn’t it?  I mean, isn't it?  There's no escaping it, that's for sure.  It's everywhere.  It's the very air we breathe.  It's so deeply woven into our cultural fabric that contemporary American life would be unrecognizable without it.   But aren't we just a little bit over it?  Maybe I'm a little late to the party to be saying so, but haven't we done the deconstruction thing to death?  Aren’t we tired of hearing and using the word “meta”?  Tired of being so analytical and self-aware?  Wouldn't it be nice to take a break from irony?  A break from skepticism?  I mean, really.  It’s exhausting.

Okay, I'll be honest.   I wouldn’t want to give postmodernism up entirely, even if I knew how to.  I'm a fan of irony.  And it's fun to be smart and clever.  Plus I’d really miss “The Daily Show”.  But it was still a little shocking to realize that this not-postmodern presentation of The Subject Was Roses was such an anomaly.  Out of the 37 plays I’ve now seen in this Year of Plays, there are only 2 or 3 productions that I can even suspect of not being fundamentally postmodern in approach.  Granted, it gets confusing.  Take a look at my thought process as I go through the list (sure, I think in bullets, don't you?):

• Does a Shakespearean aside count as “postmodern” since it breaks the fourth wall? 
• Is it postmodern to use a block for a chair, or is it just low-budget?
• Am I calling something postmodern just because it’s stylized?
• Have I mistakenly identified postmodernism as the opposite of realism when  representationalism is really what I mean? 
• Are any of these actually real words?? 
• I think I've got a case of the I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means.

Regardless of whether I've got my Big Ideas mixed up, I don’t think it insignificant that seeing a play done in this way felt comforting to me.  I think it means something that I welcomed having a moment of pure and simple theater in my world - this world where I’m rushing into cabs, and feeling vain, and making quips, and hyperlinking Wikipedia, and making parenthetical statements about thinking in bulleted lists. I think what it means is this: sometimes it's good to slow down for a second and just swallow something whole.   Like a nice bowl of homemade stew.

Gin and It

Performance Date: 04.25.10
Performance Space 122

Geez, how did they do this?

That was the recurring thought I had while watching Gin and It unfold it’s beautiful and complicated dance last Sunday eve. And not just because so much of the set-transforming, projection-catching choreography felt like watching one magic trick after another. No, the thought spawned from my insider’s brain which couldn’t help wondering how the hell they developed and rehearsed this piece.

But let me back up.

Conceptually, Gin and It – which lives in a liminal space between theater and performance installation – finds it’s genesis in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 thriller Rope, in which the famous director creates the illusion of filming the entire movie using a single, continuous shot. To pull off the stunt, particularly at that time, required a highly choreographed behind-the-scenes ballet. Grips and prop masters had to dismantle sections of the single-room set to make way for the huge camera as it followed the action, and then reassemble the set and props (in exactly the same way) in time for the shot to swing back the other direction -- all while staying out of the camera and sound operators’ way. Not an easy feat.

Gin and It in some ways replicates this feat in live performance -- and describing exactly how will be another feat altogether, but here goes. As Hitchcock’s film is projected on stage, a cast of four “grips” conduct their own “backstage” ballet, catching the projection on various surfaces that are continuously moved and manipulated throughout the piece. Frequently, the film is caught on mesh screens that permit the audience to see both the projected actor and the live actor (who is holding the screen) simultaneously.  It's a clever and spooky effect that is amplified when the grips synchronize their movements with those of the projected actor. Other times, the film is projected onto set pieces that are transformed both physically (by the crew) and seemingly (by the effect of the projection) from box to dining table to piano to armchair. As if all this were not enough, layered onto the entire dance is a tense narrative that develops amongst the grips as they work together, a narrative expressed chiefly in gesture and attitude, but supplemented by the occasional whispered conversation or “backstage” order that is called out with particular subtext. Whew.

Hopefully I’ve described the piece well enough that you can imagine how this highly technical and subtextually nuanced show made my theater brain pretty much explode. How do you develop and rehearse something like this? And I haven’t even mentioned how the projected images were sometimes sliced up into smaller pieces to fit onto various-sized screens, or how there’s this whole thematic thing about closeted homosexuality that is being echoed about. Furthermore, the technical, textual, and subtextual pieces intertwine quite intricately, and of course the whole thing is very meta-meta-meta, very deconstructed-reconstructed. It’s like someone took a macramé dress, unraveled it, and reknit it into a portrait of a macramé dress. And then someone else videotapes it and projects it onto yarn which somebody else crochets into a hat. I mean, how do you do that? (No really, how do you do that?)

Now I have an inside track – I know the lovely Keith Justin Foster, who plays one of the grips – so I can eventually satisfy my curiosity. But I’ll tell you how I imagine it was done. I imagine it was done bit and by bit, piece by piece, a la Sondheim putting it together.

I imagine they started with the technical, with a rough idea of where the projections would go and on what surfaces. And then as they rehearsed the technical, they added the textual, i.e. the cues the grips call out to one another as they work together to hit their marks. And then I imagine in the tedium of rehearsing the technical-plus-textual to a point of precision, the subtextual was born. I imagine the actors got tense or silly with one another. They joked and grimaced and flirted, as actors in rehearsal do, and from these real-life inspirations, they found what eventually became the on-stage narrative of the piece. And I imagine it was an iterative process. I know for a fact it was a long process, an extended series of rehearsal periods and workshops, but it’s not just for this reason that I imagine it was iterative. I imagine it was iterative because that’s the only way I know to build something this intricate and layered.

This is the repeated learning of my time as an artist on this earth. Art takes time. It takes iteration. Revision. It takes doing and doing again, all the while remaining open to the variation of each attempt so that it may inspire new and unexpected directions. The hardest part of this process is that your destination remains unknown – and that in itself is enough to coax an artist off the road. But if you stick to it, you find that when you arrive, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

So who knows, I could be wrong about how it all went down. Maybe Gin and It was actually born whole, like Athena out of Zeus’s head, fully armed and ready to rumble. I suppose it’s possible. But I’m not sure even an Olympian could imagine the totality of the Gin and It experience. There are five performances left, New Yorkers. Go see it and tell me what you think.