Daily Archives: April 2, 2008

SAGN

sagn spoiler alert

Part of this play is watching a man drown – an actor, and a character, who we all love – on a nightly basis. Watching the life go out of his eyes. He’s so good at it that I feel I have watched him die every night for the last week.

It’s just a simple stage illusion of a light covering him, but it’s breathtakingly painful. It reveals everything.

If it were more realistic, you wouldn’t actually get to see him die. As it is, the lack of realism forces you into the emotional truth of the situation. Abstraction, of one kind, brings out emotion. The detail of realism can get in the way of that.

Every night, I see the exact moment when his eyes under the water become dead, and it’s horrifyingly well done.

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SAGN, writing

SAGN – the final week

Previews are going well. My parents are in town, actually, to see the play tomorrow and to visit. They came from Seattle today.

The show opens Friday, and I go to Vancouver Saturday, to visit Krist3l and miQ. And then a whole week off, and then travels, ending in NYC. This will be the first time in more time than I care to think of that I haven’t known what my next show is, the first real vacation since graduating from college almost four years ago, and the first time in over ten years that I am letting directing rest for a bit to focus on writing. I am looking forward to all these things with the tangible anticipation of wanting to eat dinner, or drive fast.

I’ve been reading YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN and voyeuristically drooling over descriptions of being a Writer in New York. I expect it to be every bit as awful and painstaking as the book describes, and fraught with just as many terrible problems, but I still want it like a bad metaphor.

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