Godot opens tonight, and this morning I am mostly excited about this being the last morning of opening the library at 7:30 after a late rehearsal the night before. That’s not technically true; we will have a pickup on Thursday, but it should go fairly quickly, and I may be home at a reasonable hour. I had been thinking, as I was dragging myself in to work this week, that I seem to have aged a lot in the two years since I was last in tech week, but then remembered that my last tech week I was dragging myself to work at 9am, not 7:30. That makes a difference, too.
And then, we’re not actually having much fun, which is an energy drain. Oh, it’s not miserable, but since our Emergency Backup Gogo has to concentrate on getting through the script—understandably, since it’s a brutal part to memorize anyway and he’s only had three weeks—it has been a grind. Last night was in fact the first time we did it without calling for lines, and there were evidently a couple of absolutely brutal stretches where they went up and had no idea how to skip to whatever is next. On the other hand, they have got through it once—I imagine that anyone watching would have totally known that something was wrong, but not necessarily missed the stuff that was cut. Now they presumably know it can be done, and have (I hope) some ideas of where to jump to if they go up.
It’s possible that a more experienced Director would have used more rehearsal time on that. Our Director is youngish and hasn’t been doing this all his life; our Gogo was actually the theater teacher in his high school but he wasn’t involved in the stuff back then. Or maybe it’s not experience at all; maybe it’s just that with such limited rehearsal time the best of all possible inferior choices was to just run the thing as often as we could run it, and hope for the best.
Recently, someone demurred when I referred to myself as an amateur actor, intending (I’m sure) to compliment me that I was good at this acting stuff. I don’t think of being an amateur as being the opposite of being good, though. It’s something else entirely—for all of us in community theaters, the play we’re involved in at the moment is not going to pay our rent, it isn’t going to further our careers, it isn’t going to be our big breaks. Most of us work forty-hour weeks at some non-theater job in addition to rehearsing or building sets or hanging lights or writing grant proposals or sweeping floors (or sometimes doing all of those things). We do this for ourselves, and for each other, and for the audiences, and in some sort of sentimental bullshit way we do it for The Theater.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
I am glad for all of the reasons that you do it, because I am glad indeed that you do it.
I hope the performances have been more fun than the late-stage rehearsals!
I am curious to learn how you felt the voices worked.
The first performances were somewhat stressful, but I think we have begun to relax into the thing.
I don’t know if the voices are working or not. There are moments in my performance I really like, and others that I think may not be right at all. The best thing, presumably, would be to ask someone who has actually seen it, but that may be difficult for you.
Thanks,
-V.