I was, however, reminded of something. I have to find ways to conserved my energy in this play. The role is simply too big to play full out for two hours plus. Not so much physically as emotionally. This is where my training in naked face work is paying off. This is where the theory of letting the audience shoulder some of the burden really helps. There are spots where I can let them drive the bus, as it were, for a little while. I don't have to do it all myself.
Over the years I've done a few, not many, but a few roles of this size. It's been awhile, of course, but I have done it before and I know the roadmap. So this keeps me from panicking. One thought that surfaces is the simple idea of staying in the moment. Once I start thinking about what comes next, what the next big moment is, I start to gear up for it. Best to just play what I'm doing and not worry about it. Strasbergians would no doubt find this idea appalling. But most Strasbergians aren't trained to work onstage anyway. By the very nature of what they're taught, they only know how to rehearse. They're blind when it comes to actually performing a role. Suffice to say, most method actors never even consider the fact that there's an audience in the room watching them. They consider the audience not as the final character in the play, as I do, but as a necessary evil.
I could write a lot about that, but not now. So we went back and looked at a couple of the Roman/Sam scenes yesterday and did a little fine tuning. I've said it before but what a pleasure it is to work with Rob Arbogast in these scenes. He 'gets it' so very quickly. Completely open to anything new that will make the scene better. Ego, for all intents and purposes, left at the doorstep. A genuine pleasure to work off of.
Victor (our director) has a mountain to climb with the lights and sound on this piece. Good Lord, just a thousand cues to work on. We've hired a new lighting designer, a very capable and talented young man (Coby is his name) that is really throwing himself into it. Our original lighting designer, the award-winning Luke Moyer, simply had too many other shows to light and couldn't give us the time needed. Good for him, bad for us. But he recommended young Coby and in the long run, probably this is for the best.
The marketing people are in high gear. Ticket reservations are coming in very quickly now. It's all good.
The next three days are gonna be twelve to sixteen hour days. Oy. Long, hard, time-consuming work, but absolutely necessary.
An interesting side note: I've been contacted by a guy in Romania, of all places, about translating the play into Romanian and producing there; I'm assuming in Belgrade. This tickles me. I've given the go-ahead on this and look forward to seeing what happens with it.
Opening night looms. Tension is building in the theatre. We're on the precipice of something really cool, I think. Now it's just a matter of putting this huge jigsaw puzzle together. We have all the pieces. A lot of pieces. None of us know quite what the finished picture will be.
See you tomorrow.
