Perhaps it is time for an update on the play. We open a week from tonight, and at the moment it feels drastically underrehearsed. Of course, there is usually a point at which I start to panic, thinking we will never get ready in time, and why should this show be different? Actually, my feeling at the moment is not so much panic—I am sanguine that we will muddle through somehow to opening night.
I can’t tell how good it will be. That’s pretty common, too. I am distressingly bad at imagining how stuff works from the stage, or even from the audience. That is, if I am in the audience, I will sometimes find that the rest of the audience is loving a thing or not loving a thing, and I have no idea why. Or why my reaction is different. So I have no idea, really, whether audiences will love the play or be bored.
I do think that the rhythm and arc of the play is starting to come together at last. There were two major blocking changes in my scenes that have both been very positive, and have helped (I think) prepare the audience for the mother-son relationship. My only major worry is whether our lead will forget enough of her lines and blocking to create obvious moments of distracting covering, or whether she will come through once she’s in front of an audience. I suspect she will come through. I mean, it’s an immense part: she’s onstage the whole play (except two or three very short breaks, I mean, one- and two- page breaks) and she talks through much of it. Even worse, she initiates the topic of almost all her conversations, through all their meandering turns; I can’t really turn to her and say Was that a scissortail I didn’t see or I bet I remind you of someone, standing here like this or I know I was just leaving the room, but I suspect you wanted to call me back in to ask me something, didn’t you? So I have a great deal of sympathy with her plight. On the other hand, what a great part. I mean, I don’t even like the play much, but the role is terrific.
Oh, and that last line is working much better. In fact, y’all’s comments have made me rethink an earlier exhange, which goes
MOTHER WATTS: I know, Ludie. Now you’re here, wouldn’t you like to come inside, son, and look around?
LUDIE: I don’t think I’d better, Mama. I don’t see any use in it. It would just make me feel bad. I’d rather remember it like it was.
MOTHER WATTS: The old house has gotten kind of run down, hasn’t it?
LUDIE: Yes, it has.
MOTHER WATTS: I don’t think it’ll last out the next Gulf storm.
LUDIE: It doesn’t look like it would.
This is before Ludie has his big emotional breakdown, and also before he explodes in anger at his mother’s continued attempts to delay their return to Houston. He is still angry, he is still emotionally wrought up about the ordeal. But these are not pivotal lines, they are part of the buildup rather than the peak.
I had (I think quite effectively) been saying Yes, it has with a sort of contempt. Ludie’s focus at this point is in getting Mother Watts back to the car before Jessie Mae gets tired of waiting and comes out fighting (as of course does happen); he makes several attempts to get to the car before and after this. My line reading had been with the subtext that the broken-down house was not worth coming out to see, and certainly isn’t worth delaying the return home to investigate.
This is with the other undercurrent that Ludie really does not want to go back to the house, for whatever reason: he spends twenty years refusing to take his mother even to visit, and once she does force him to the doorstep, refuses to go in. I am playing it that Ludie refuses even to look at the house until the above line sequence forces him to; the audience may not pick up on any of the details, but they should become aware by this point that whatever memories Mother Watts has, Ludie’s memories of this house are not good ones.
So, considering the helpful comments in the earlier thread, I have changed my delivery of those lines. I make a bigger deal of this being the first time I have really looked at the house, and now say yes, it has in a tone of wonder and disbelief. As a response to Ludie’s transparently false claim that he’s rather remember it like it was, he is surprised to discover that it hasn’t gotten bigger, as it has in his memory, it’s gotten smaller.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.