Saturday Playhouse
Oct. 21st, 2006 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceCoo, that was odd. I just spent all day in rehearsal, with my play "A Cold Coming". Which is I think the first time in twenty-five years that I've been involved that side of the theatre.
It hasn't changed much - and clearly, neither have I. More ammunition, for those who cry "What, will you never grow up?"
Empty hall, empty stage. Little cluster of people at the front. And for half an hour, forty-five minutes, you do - well, nothing. Chit-chat. Say the same things three times over to newcomers, as they drift in one by one, because this is Theatre, and it depends on getting a whole bunch of people together, and there's always going to be somebody who isn't. And you pass through the joking about it, through the anxiety about it, through the irritation; and then in the end you ask somebody else to read in, and "let's get on with it, shall we?"
So you do; and from the moment the first actor reads the first line, there's a switch that gets thrown somewhere, and you're engaged in a process of creative intensity that I've never met anywhere else. You don't get it anywhere in the process of prose; it's that thing about having half a dozen minds all focused on the same lines, the same problem, right there in the same space; and it's enthralling, even when they're Completely Wrong (as indeed, so much of the time they are). It eats time: five hours solid today, and it's a short play and we didn't actually get to the end.
And, yes, I loved it. Just as much as I did when I was a teenager, and enraptured by the Theatre, darling. Even when they were being Completely Wrong - which were, oddly, those times when they were straying most from what I'd seen in my own head, whether in the lines or the action or the interpretation. Which is why I still insist that I'm a novelist and will stay that way, however much I may enjoy this. I don't have the generosity to be a playwright. I lack the collective nature, that feeling that work is improved by other people's input, other perspectives. It's my baby, it's perfect in my head, and every iteration beyond that is a blurring, a weakening, a fracture. A separation. Yes, even my own iteration of it, from my head onto the page: that above all, perhaps. But then other people take it away and supply the wrong faces, the wrong voices, wrong emphases in the wrong space. Shriek!
And yet, I do love it; and they are welcome to it; and yes, of course I want to do more.
It hasn't changed much - and clearly, neither have I. More ammunition, for those who cry "What, will you never grow up?"
Empty hall, empty stage. Little cluster of people at the front. And for half an hour, forty-five minutes, you do - well, nothing. Chit-chat. Say the same things three times over to newcomers, as they drift in one by one, because this is Theatre, and it depends on getting a whole bunch of people together, and there's always going to be somebody who isn't. And you pass through the joking about it, through the anxiety about it, through the irritation; and then in the end you ask somebody else to read in, and "let's get on with it, shall we?"
So you do; and from the moment the first actor reads the first line, there's a switch that gets thrown somewhere, and you're engaged in a process of creative intensity that I've never met anywhere else. You don't get it anywhere in the process of prose; it's that thing about having half a dozen minds all focused on the same lines, the same problem, right there in the same space; and it's enthralling, even when they're Completely Wrong (as indeed, so much of the time they are). It eats time: five hours solid today, and it's a short play and we didn't actually get to the end.
And, yes, I loved it. Just as much as I did when I was a teenager, and enraptured by the Theatre, darling. Even when they were being Completely Wrong - which were, oddly, those times when they were straying most from what I'd seen in my own head, whether in the lines or the action or the interpretation. Which is why I still insist that I'm a novelist and will stay that way, however much I may enjoy this. I don't have the generosity to be a playwright. I lack the collective nature, that feeling that work is improved by other people's input, other perspectives. It's my baby, it's perfect in my head, and every iteration beyond that is a blurring, a weakening, a fracture. A separation. Yes, even my own iteration of it, from my head onto the page: that above all, perhaps. But then other people take it away and supply the wrong faces, the wrong voices, wrong emphases in the wrong space. Shriek!
And yet, I do love it; and they are welcome to it; and yes, of course I want to do more.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-21 08:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-21 10:08 pm (UTC)Also, if I wanted to be part of the gang, I guess I'd still be acting. I want to be the lonesome moody one sitting at the end of a row and saying little, occasionally tossing some trenchant comment into the mix and otherwise largely biting my tongue, in order not to cry "No, no, don't say it like that, say it like this...!"