Owning

"Some, out of pride, try to hide their feelings, but their clumsy assumption of bravado does not deceive their companions. Everybody knows what the matter is and keeps his thoughts to himself, out of humanity."

--Dostoevsky, in The House of the Dead

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Driving home in the rain tonight, I came around a bend on the highway heading south. It's the last gradual curve before the insanity of downtown. Ahead, a semi merged into the rightmost lane and reflected the red and blue flashes of a cop car hidden around beneath an overpass. The red and blue melded into a sort of hot purple, a magenta, on the side of the semi's load, and I saw it through the streaks of a drizzle-dappled windshield. It wasn't anything amazing, but it was a little psychedelic.

After successive nights of unsuccessful sleep, I'm on NyQuil for the first time in years. I've been horizontal now for thirty minutes and I'm starting to feel the undertow.

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Bad days can have good endings, and vice-versa, or there are confusing days when the good and bad alternate. The sun shines on your labor; the rain falls on your rest.

We emptied the trailer in the parking lot and it began to rain after an hour of lifting. It continued throughout the day. Unexpected camaraderie with the jaded movers was a boost, though. Something about a man grinning maniacally as he straps a pile of boxes to his back and runs down a rainy asphalt slope makes you wonder why you bothered with college.

My colleague wants to shift job responsibilities so that it lessens my paperwork load and increases the time I spend teaching workshops. I'm okay with it. I just hope this doesn't render my office time pointless...there's something for making yourself useful, of course, and because most of our costumes are still in storage, naturally I see myself unpacking for hours on end in the near future.

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The after-school drama program at the theatre across town started yesterday afternoon. It went well--a total of seventeen kids attended, and this is the group for the next nine classes and, of course, the final show. By the end of class, we had a better idea of how to run the rest of this month's sessions.

My assistant, Allison, had them play a game in which they tell a story one person at a time, one sentence at a time. Although every story ended with the world ending and all the characters dying--clearly we need to devote some time to plot structure and creativity--the stories they came up with had a surprising amount of depth in them. I'd like to use that impulse, harness it, so that the script we use for the final show can be derived from these classroom exercises. My hope is that once they realize they have to play the characters that die sudden and un-fulfilling deaths, they will curb the killing instinct...if that makes sense.

In other words, I want to do as little writing as possible. I'd rather record what they come up with in an improv game.

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There are plenty of ways to approach the making of theatre. At The Children's Theatre, the mainstage rehearsal process is very choreography-based, understandable since the co-directors both come from dance backgrounds. So the characters come from movement, the personalities from blocking, and all creativity in a role--the true creation of your own part--takes place within very rigid confines. And that's not necessarily a bad thing (co-workers commonly say that we don't reinvent the wheel when we do shows for kids), but it is definitely one way of doing theatre.

This other program, the after-school program, gives me an opportunity to make theatre happen in a different way. For me, it's more fun. I want to let the performers really play, to take hold of the story and tell it the way they want to and not the way I want them to--or worse, the way I would tell it. They can build it as they find it most interesting to build it, and in the end, it will have made sense to them.

Sometimes, the hardest part about learning choreography is figuring out where you stand (or sit, or lean, or hop) in the big picture, the staged image. When you come up with it yourself, it's much more involving, at least in my opinion.

We'll see. Tomorrow we'll have the second class, introduce some rules, and let them play, for goodness' sake. Ultimately, the more fun they have, the more they'll learn.

Right?