Day 24, Sun June 25
We wake up like we’re going to battle, and go to the theater. We barricade ourselves in Semele with water bottles and folding chairs, and prepare to rehearse. To repeat. To rejoice.
We rehearse for four and a half hours, with a crew of tried and true actors – AVW, BH, and MOH&H are all proudly represented – and two new to the Dara Experience. They jump in like champs. We learn music at breakneck speed. I have an hour left at the end of it to do the bad director’s version of talking them through the play. Enough is enough. I leave it. I go five minutes overtime, which I am still vaguely ashamed of.
We eat pizza and spinach. We put bags of ice and frozen corn on our heads. We walk over the stage to the one restroom. Chris works music in the piano nook behind the stage while I take actors outside to talk over their parts – the Messenger, Oedipus, Medea. We make strong choices. We do shortcut staging. We decide. Directing in the fast lane.
We do the reading with a small but intense audience – some old HW friends, my designer cohort of Dan and Erin, a director from my freelance AD world, actor friends, and, just like with the cast, two who have never seen my work before.
I take the actors outside and remind them, in Prof. Martin’s words, that “the chorus exists because people come in groups.” We sing a song to warm-up and for sound check – we have a real hard-core audio engineer recording us – and we launch ahead. I babble at the audience about the chorus, about larger political and social movements, vs. the heroic individual characters. I make no sense. I sit down. They begin.
The reading is lovely. Everything works, as we knew it would. The actors deliver something with all the intensity I could have desired. I am beside myself with joy with the transitions from the Wasps to the Persians to the Wasps/Persians mash-up choruses. The world is real. One chorus is bleeding into another.
The audience begins the discussion, afterwards, by saying “Have you thought about masks?” and continue to generously share staging ideas with me. I realize to what extent I’ve separated myself from directing, because I haven’t thought about it at all. An hour of feedback later, all the comments have been positive. They like the music, they like the tone, they like the poetry – they spent the reading imagining it as a live production.
They suggest, without any prompting from me, that characters go into / come out of the chorus, that the ensemble all learn all the lines, and that this production be driven by the chorus. I have managed to get this idea which is stuck in my head, and stick it in some other people’s heads. I’ve created something which can stand for itself. I know that there’s no way I could have done it without Chris. The music is what makes this special. I’ve gotten the text to a good level, but his work is what makes mine work.
It’s over. We put the chairs back, lock the space, and go home. We talk as if the words were going to expire at midnight. We’re both very proud. It couldn’t have gone better, in either of our dreams, although I’m sure Chris wishes we’d been able to secure a piano without a malignant G sharp key, or else that he had written that note into less of the music. But things like that aren’t worth even remembering, in the face of this – a triumph.
“Good show.”
“Good show.”
Day 25, Mon June 26
The day after. The meaning of fatigue. We teach three hours of chorus workshops, polishing the work the students have done for their final showcase. We drive to check out a house for Chris’s brother in Eagle Rock. Back to H-W to record Chris for the showcase (since he won’t be there).
And then, since this entire trip began with a beach, looking over the Pacific from Seattle, we defy traffic and drive from the 101, over Topanga Canyon, up PCH to Zuma. Chris runs on the beach while I sit, freezing, wrapped in a towel, and feeling the first terrible sensations of post-opening maudlinity. I miss the play already. We swim in raging waves, and the waters knock me out of feeling any kind of sorry, or anything but good.
Then, trying to give Chris as much Los Angeles as he can handle in his last hours, I take the winding, wealth-track boulevard of Sunset all the way back from the coast, through the Palisades, through the Strip, through Hollywood to Los Feliz, and we stop at Zankou Chicken. I tell him that if he were Ben Affleck, or Mark Wahlberg, or (better yet) Vin Diesel on a bad day, he would dispatch his personal assistant for half a chicken.
The moment we get into the house I crash so hard I’m still falling. No one told me that writing would be harder than directing – and feel better – and hurt more – all at once. I’ve never been this tired. It has nothing to do with how little sleep my body has gotten, and everything to do with the release of tension of this reading being over. I can’t be awake.
Day 26, Tuesday, June 27
Somehow I wake up, and drive Chris to the airport this morning. The last song that his IPod shuffled into our consciousness was Rush’s “Fly By Night.”
“Fly by night, away from here
Change my life again…”
I drove away from the airport, feeling, again, like I had beaten the universe at its own game of chess. Who gets to be me, and do the things I do? Who gets to write a new chorus play-with-music while traveling from Vancouver to Los Angeles? I sang the songs from 13 CHORUS as I drove back to H-W, for another scene study meeting. Chris texted me from the security line that he’d just realized what he wished he’d played differently in the Overture. We both have the show stuck in our heads.
The rest of this week has been full of catching up on things that were shelved for the WCX – things like family, friends, finances, work. Every time I open something I think I couldn’t possibly be more broke than the last time, but this is a record. Perhaps I should say “broken.” I feel like half a person, or a quarter. I don’t know what to do with myself.
On Wednesday I had dinner with Ethan and Veronica, two friends and audience members from Sunday, to hear more of their thoughts on the script. It overwhelms me, and makes me grateful, how strong the response has been. E&V push me on the narrative structure, on the difference between TO DIE IN ATHENS (an Oedipus-based story) and 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS (a chorus-based story.) I realize I have work to do. I have to contact thirteen translators, or else decide I’m going to re-translate all these works myself.
But the feedback continues to be good. Even our audio engineer has emailed me to tell me that he’s loved working on the tape.
Today I had lunch with my parents (a good reminder that I do have a life outside of the theater, and people who love me no matter what) and went back to the high school to polish the chorus showcase scene. They are the best class I’ve ever had. I think the way that Chris and I got to be working on chorus scenes and the play at the same time really paid off.
I also returned Phil W’s drum to him, and managed to get a ticket coming off of the Cahuenga offramp. Thanks, LA. I’ve only been in Los Angeles a week…it reminds me why this town and I don’t really mix any more. Traffic school again, I suppose.
But for now, I’m here – house-sitting in Pasadena with two dogs, working on a grant for the Convergence, turning in job applications (I’m hoping to work for the DNC / for Obama’s campaign for the summer) and reeling from the many things that have happened, all at once. I’m making plans to see all the friends I’ve missed for this past year. I’m looking forward to working on a political campaign, and gaining, at least for some time, some life experience unrelated to the stage or the chorus. I know it won’t be long before I come back to it – in fact, I know I won’t leave it at all. It’ll be in my mind all the time.
“Change my life again,” indeed. My year of freelance assistant directing is over. My life of writing (playwriting, poetry, and others) is beginning.
Dara Weinberg 