Madness madness, putting it all together in San Francisco and trying to make the show breathe. Our set is amazing. Our costumes are awesome. Our cast is extraordinary. The sound is making something of nothing. The lights are making our shifts make sense. There are plenty of moments still where as an actor I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m pleased with our last-minute rewrites and still sorting out how the ending comes together. We’re not in too much debt yet. Things are coming together. They’re coming. We have two days of rehearsal left until an audience sees a preview.
Eep!
I’m feeling very disorganized. Ever since we hit crunch time a few weeks ago, I’ve let so much personal stuff slide—I have an unpaid parking ticket from weeks ago; I haven’t followed up on the fact that I never got confirmation for filing my taxes; I have checks to deposit in my bank account and emails to write and my laptop desktop is a scrambled mess, and my car tabs need to be renewed, and and and and…
And there’s Nebunele business that’s on hold at the moment too; if you’ve donated recently and you haven’t got your Little Crazies welcome email or your T-shirt etc., it’s because that’s on my important-but-not-urgent list, the one I keep telling myself I’ll get to after we open.
I need a couple hours just to sit down and sort myself out. I’m not sure I’ll get it until, oh, the 13th. But it’s all going to be fine. I’m pretty sure.
San Francisco is lovely, EXIT is treating us very well and it’s so good to hang out with these guys again, and despite my feeling of being slightly out of control I’m also full of excitement and anticipation. So, scrambling. So, living. All of it will go on.
Crazy week from me to you! Come see the show if you’re in SF!
xoxo
Alissa
Didn’t get around to posting this yesterday morning, and last night I was writing this sitting on Dave (my excellent host)’s bed while he studied up about trombones and I tried to unwind from a good but sort of bewildering rehearsal. I think I need a new paragraph to talk about it.
I have this thing, sometimes, where as an actor if I get lost in a scene, and it’s a bit overwhelming to know what to do, and maybe I’ve also been putting in long days for a while and feeling like I’m not doing everything perfectly, where I get frustrated and a little emotional. A sort of fear comes in—that I won’t get it, that I’ll be lost in these scenes forever, that they are impenetrable to me and always will be. So I got a little teary in rehearsal yesterday, to the mild consternation of my director. But something I’ve learned about myself is that when that happens, I can use my own slight panic to make a shift in the scene I’m doing. I think it was Judy Shahn, my voice teacher at UW, who first had me work through my frustration-tears, and something about crying makes some (not all) of the blocks sort of go away. So I cried a little bit, and then I made a little progress. Last night, though, I was just feeling raw. I lost my grip on the play a little, and though I found some new stuff, I haven’t really got a handhold on it as a whole again. I’m beginning to maybe acknowledge that my bizarrely frenetic happiness and excitement that’s been bubbling up inside for the last week or so has a flip side that has probably been equally present despite my denial of it. My weird calm was masking a storm I don’t want to admit to myself.
Or maybe I just got tired. What a day. I love this work; this work wears me out like a hooker’s butt wears out her jeweled thong; I don’t get this work at all; this work teaches me more about myself than Mr. Miagi taught Daniel-San.
Here’s what I saw on the T-shirts they’re selling at Guerilla Coffee: “It’s job of the artist to make the revolution irresistible.”