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Can’t sleep, though I’ve been trying to for an hour and a half. Sounds of four other women sleeping, the play buzzing in my head. Getting up. Warm milk? Mm, yes, I’ll be back.

***

We’re deep in the play, down here in California. The six of us, me, Claytie, Scofie, Brynna, Joy, and Beth, are living at my parents’ house while we live, eat, sleep, breathe, drink, and excrete this play. For two weeks, we have scheduled work from 10am until 11pm daily, and we’ve been consistently working on our own later than that. The play is coming together–these last two days have been hardcore writing days, and we’ve completed at least one draft of the thing, which is reassuring. Communal living, the girls all sleeping in the same basement apartment, Scofie upstairs in the bedroom, every conversation about the play at some point. My parents, saints, offering up their home to the ravages of six people age 24-30, ranging from kin to stranger, who are all bent on ignoring their hosts and creating this beast.

It’s kind of heaven.

We’ve completed three days of this 14-day retreat, and so far it’s going much more productively than I feared it might, and it reaffirms my faith in the collective; we have here six people hungry for exhaustion, working our tails off. We’ll see how long we sustain this pace, but honestly, the atmosphere is invigorating–the momentum is awesome. We’ll see. I’m speaking awfully generally because it’s nearly four in the morning; give me a break. Here, this is our schedule.

Monday we arrived, after the 11-hour drive; four of us at about 10pm, the other two at about 4am. Said hello, crashed into bed. Tuesday we got up, went grocery shopping, arranged the basement into a rehearsal studio, began rehearsal at 1pm. At 4, we took a break, then the three ‘main’ writers on the project (Beth, Claytie, and me, though everybody contributes material) had a meeting about how on earth we were going to generate a single script from the hundreds of pages of scenes and notes that we already had generated over the course of our rehearsal process. Meantime, Joy planned rehearsal, Brynna developed a movement piece inspired by that day’s rehearsal, and Scofie worked feverishly on categorizing all the raw draft material so that we could use it productively. at 6:30 Beth & I made dinner; we ate together with my parents, 8 of us perfectly filling the table; Joy & Brynna cleaned up; we had a meeting in which the writers unveiled the plan (which begins with two days of rather hardcore writing to achieve our own three versions of the play whose main points we have already agreed on, drawing from the vast pool of material and continuing to add.) We went over the writing that had spun off from that afternoon’s rehearsal, and decided the next day’s schedule. Then bed.

Wednesday: convene at 10am for an hour-long run through the woods. Then shower, eat, reconvene in the rehearsal space downstairs for a two-hour-long character development exercise with Joy and the three actors (Claytie, me, Brynna.) Afterward: individual work time. The writers writing, Brynna working on movement and fight choreography and writing, Scofie getting our press release out, Joy processing the pieces of writing that Beth was starting to complete (Beth is by far the fastest writer.) At 6 my dad’s band showed up and we all cooked dinner. Talked to a friend of the band’s, a videographer who might create a piece for us about our making of the show. Post-dinner meeting: watched some fights that Brynna wanted us to think about for our show, planned the next day. Decided on final names for our characters. Writers continued to work until they crashed. Well, everyone did, but I was too focused on the script to see what anyone else was doing.

Today (Thursday): Convene at 10am for another hour-long run. Return, stretch together, shower. Hit the script. Joy & Brynna go shopping for more groceries and design supplies. Scofie continues to comb through all our material, tweaks a timeline of the history of our characters, pulls our schedules together. We write until 5pm, when it’s time for rehearsal.

We improvise on a scene that we all like but can’t quite decide how to work into the script until 7. Find some interesting stuff. Joy & Brynna make dinner while writers keep writing; we eat dinner, then convene after dinner to read aloud the first completed rough draft: Beth’s. Much excitement. Rounds of feedback. Joy read my script and we had a quick conversation about it, then to bed.

I’m working on giving the character who’s in a coma more of a throughline, thinking about her relationship with each of her sisters, thinking about two extreme states of discomfort: that someone you love sees you so well that you don’t want them to see any more; and the opposing, painful feeling that that person you love who is looking at you and saying they understand does not understand, will never understand. Loneliness of that.

Tomorrow we’ll read Claytie’s version and my version both aloud and figure out what elements of each are important to continue working with and which we might scrap. Then the writers will start passing around ownership of the one central script, handing out writing assignments, editing, combing, combining. We’ll kick into overdrive on rehearsal, since we’re doing a stumble-through next Friday of the whole thing. Meanwhile, I’m sore from running and my brain is buzzing and I’m happy from rehearsal today and I feel like it’s working, like it’s starting to gel, like the way forward into a funny, serious, risky, thoughtful play that is genuinely the product of six people is becoming clear.

I fully expect to be completely disillusioned and discouraged shortly.

But for the moment, let me savor this: sweet freedom, sweet immersion. The bills are all paid, the boyfriends and social lives are all 500 miles distant, work is on hold, the chores are gotten out of the way, and we are up. to. our. ears. in play. Tonight, even though I can’t sleep at all, life is good.

Trying to calm down about it all,
Alissa

Oh, but I have to also tell you about the awful dream I had last night, perhaps the manifestation of my anxiety that this is all a terrible idea. I was talking to my childhood cat, imaginatively named Kitty, who is no longer among the living. But in my dream, she was alive, and could talk, and was named something else, something to do with the play. She was at the end of her life, and in pain, and asked me to help her die. I agreed, and the way that I did so was to take a hand saw and begin cutting her into chunks, beginning with sawing off her hindquarters. I did that and started in on her ribcage. The dull saw snagged on her skin and bone, and she said to me quite calmly: “Ow, that hurts. I changed my mind. Please don’t kill me after all.” But it was too late; I could see that I had already killed her, and that her death would only be slower and more painful if I didn’t complete the job. So I continued sawing at her, only now she was pleading with me to stop. I woke feeling horrible, and it took me an hour to shake the feeling off.

So. I hope that dream’s not an omen. But maybe now that I’ve wrenched it out of my subconscious it will leave me in peace and let me sleep; it’s true that as I started to drift tonight, it was the memory of that dream that brought me back to full awareness. Kitty, forgive me; I loved you.