After every preview, director Joe Calarco, reminds the very talented Leslie Kritzer and Catherine Cox to “Play the Love” between their characters.

The Memory Show is a funny and heartbreaking story of a Daughter who moves back home to take care of her Mother who’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.  What makes this play tricky from a directorial point of view is that this two person family does not get along.  They love each other but they also fight with each other, alot.

Director Joe Calarco, and the Company working a Moment on Stage

Whats smart about this play, is that the conflict between the characters is entertaining and skillfully in place with a lot of humor.  They are fun to watch.  It’s like when you go to your best friends house and hear the nags and jabs that occur between them and their family.  However, sometimes these characters push each others buttons to far. What makes this Mother/Daughter team always compelling to watch is that even in the worst of moments they are wrangling with just how to love each other. It is the hook for an audiences interest.

After working along side Joe Calarco for over a month now, I get a feeling that this theme of “Playing the Love” is in everything he does.  He just can’t help it, and I think its what makes his work so successful.

I am finishing out my last week here in at Barrington Stage, and am reminded that this theme is more than just a way to work on a play.  It is a way to live a life in the theater.  All of the artists I have met here in the Berkshires, live with tough and important choices of how to thrive and express what is in their hearts.   It is the hook for them.  Its what makes their lives so moving.

It has made me proud to have lived, and worked among them.  It is the reminder for me to continue to “Play the Love” in not only in my art but also in my life.

Putting the Finishing Touches on the Set.

They are called 10 out of 12’s.  We work for 10 hours with a 2 hour break.  We meet at the top of the day and wait half an hour for the actors to get into their costumes. We start to run the play from the beginning.   After a few lines are spoken the stage manager says,”Hold!” from where he is perched with a table, his master script and a computer.  The actors hold the positions they are in.  During this time the lighting designer makes adjustments to how the stage is lit or the sound designer perfects a an audio cue.  This is how we work through the entire show, top to bottom.  It’s like making stop motion animation, or sitting in the editing room of a feature film.

What’s important about this time in the development of a show is that its more that just putting together dry technical elements.  It is time to freeze each moment and look at all the possible combination’s of what can make the story effectively told. In the best of scenarios this is done in a relaxed, creative way.  It is when a director has the chance to focus the attention of an audience and ask the question,”How do we tell the story”, instead of,” What is the story we are telling.”

So we sit in the dark of the theatre, and wait for the actors to say a few more lines.   We sit in the dark and wait  for the stage manager to say,”hold”.

For me it is a time of tremendous curiosity.

The second musical of Barrington Stage’s Music Theater Lab is The Memory Show written by Zach Redler and Sara Cooper is a touching two person musical about a young woman who had moved back home to take care of her mother who is suffering from Alzheimer.

The rehearsal process of this play has been like watching a game of Chess, where there are multiple players.   The tone of the game is thoughtful and meditative.  I watch as the actors find their relationship to each other as a Mother/Daughter living together in Coney Island.  I see them map out their emotional paths as well as their comic ones.  I take in Joe Calarco, the director, work with the actors and writers.  He works on instinct, he works from experience, he work on his connection to the heart of the play.   I hear the writers, listen, and then listen some more to the input of everyone around them.  The cuts, edits and changes they make are subtle, profound, clean and effective.

Everyone is rooted in process and stabs are very rarely made in the dark.  They may not know thier next move but they are definitely thinking about.  It is a game of proportion. It is a game of Balance.  How the text, the music, the story and the actors all live in relation to one another.

I get to sit back and see situations, solutions and moves that come up often in the rehearsal room.  It is the optimal postition for me to learn.

Oh!  we do get a day off too…here is a pix of a great night listening to a Brass Quartet in a park in Lenox MA

nothing like relaxing on the lawn

TOUCH TEAM

What a fantastic thing it is to learn something and then have an opportunity to implement what you learned.

Tuesday night was the presentation of Sam Salmond and Ayesu Lartey’s TOUCH.  It was my chance to work on a musical and use all the directing skills I absorbed while assisting Daniella Topol and Joe Calarco.

I we had 4 days, 3 actors, 2 writers and 1 hot sweaty rehearsal room.  I can’t begin to express what  an incredible experience it was.  It felt like a perfect little package.  A hands on experience.  It  has really has helped made clear what it is I am doing up here in the Berkshires: becoming the kind of director I envision myself to be.

I  could go into detail about the intense rehearsals that ran late into the night.  Perhaps that would explain this event that I am talking about.  Or rather, I could talk about the emails, text messages, conversations, cajolings, conflicts, encouragements, urges, instincts, impulses passions and loves that would help you understand just what was experienced.

Yet, the truth is that I felt that something inexplicable inside of me click.  I see  how the best directors are ones that create more than a play or a musical, but rather the environment for an event to take place in  hearts and minds of humanity.

I would really like to be one of those directors.

In the words of one of the characters in TOUCH, Dr. Wonders : Awe Yeah!

The Touch Cast and Me

Composer Ayesu Lartey and Myself

Our summer in Ithaca with the Hangar Theatre as Drama League Fellows has come to a close.  Along with the 24 actors and four ADs, we said our farewells and packed up our temporary homes, dispersing back to the corners of the country from whence we came.  I blogged earlier this summer about how directors must embrace the significance of transitions.  They’re beautiful but always slightly traumatic – everything feels up in the air and you must find a way to ride the wind gracefully.

I found this poem, by a Greek poet named Cavafy, about the journey home to Ithaca.  I think it applies just as aptly to the exodus from Ithaca, especially those lines at the end. We have all become wiser, and full of experience.  How grateful I am for this journey.  How changed.

ITHACA, by C.P. Cavafy [1910]
As you set out for Ithaca
hope that your journey is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon — don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare sensation
touches your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon — you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope that your journey is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind–
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and learn again from those who know.

Keep Ithaca always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so that you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.
Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would have not set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithacas mean.

FAREWELL ITHACA!

Pool Boy is now running to sold out audiences and standing ovations every night.  Yesterday, in fact I got the opportunity to run a rehearsal and implement some new line changes.  This gave me the chance to work directly with the cast and writers again.  It felt good to be close to the show after it has opened, and to be able to help writer Janet Allard see another color in her Musical.

The Memory Show  rehearsals began last Friday.  We have been doing lots of delicate, beautiful work around a table this week. We have been working to understand the complexities and intricacies of this play about a daughter taking care of her elderly mother diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Director Joe Calarco has a simple and direct approach to understanding the text which makes this very moving play even more effective than it already is.

Finally there is Touch, The Musical.

You see, the first day of rehearsals of Pool Boy Sam Salmond, William Finns assistant and playwright, I got talking.  He told me about this 20 minute musical he wrote with composer Ayesu Lartey called TOUCH.  Soon there after we asked Natasha Sinha,  Julie Boyd’s assistant, to help up produce it.

Natasha and Sam working hard

We are presenting Touch at a sight specific piece in a classroom at St Joe’s catholic school, which is where all the Stage 2 productions rehearse, this coming Tuesday night.  We have an amazing cast and fantastic creative team.

I couldn’t be more excited.

Touch Team Creatives

Touch's Cast and Music Director Getting it going

So Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse opened and closed. The show was a true delight to put together and even more fun to watch.  I kept joking with my cast that I’d never before directed a play without any sex or violence in it; I wasn’t sure if I’d be any good at it, much less enjoy the challenge. But I did!

I know that I have the tendency to read deeply into any text (you should hear my glosses of Hillary Duff’s lyrics!), but ultimately I felt like this play was a true expression of what I believe, what I personally wrestle with, and what I hope for the world. May we all learn to accept change with grace, as Lilly eventually learns to love her new baby brother.   Like Lilly in the Lightbulb Lab and the Uncooperative Chair, may we all use the twin practices of art-making and quiet contemplation to work through the emotions that trouble us. And may we all move towards a larger, more inclusive vision of community  where we invite everyone to come along on the big adventures, like Lilly does at the play’s end.

One of the great things about directing is that, unlike when you’re an actor, you actually get to see the show. Over and over.  Hopefully this is a good thing.  If not, you may have a problem.  If you don’t even enjoy watching your work, how can you expect others to? Sometimes I feel like half my job is watching.  Watching with love, watching with skepticism, watching for clarity, watching for honesty, watching for improvement, watching for inspiration, watching for consistency, watching to remind the actors about the weight –and thrill–of the audience’s eyes.

After a show closes, many theatre artists experience withdrawals.  You miss the company of people you worked with, actors miss the rush of being onstage, etc.  As a director, I experience pain knowing I’ll never see certain things ever again.  Hopefully in each show you’ve cultivated one or two moments so beautiful (at least to you) that they leave behind a sort of longing ache, like knowing you’ll never again see the sunset over a certain gorgeous beach. Photos and video can’t capture these moments.  And they’re so specific they’re sometimes hard to share, even with others in the show.

For example, my Wedge show, An Idiot. It’s not that I miss the last scene of the play, rather I miss the visceral experience of the huge doors swinging open after Myshkin’s speech, revealing Rogozhin sitting uncomfortably in that red chair that’s been haunting the stage for the entire show.  I miss the sound of the cross necklace hitting the floor when Rogozhin rips it from his neck and throws it at Myshkin’s feet.

There are so many moments from Lilly that I’m sad I’ll never see again. They’ll live on in my memory, changing color and texture over time. I’m going to record a few here so that they don’t slip away too quickly.  We aren’t allowed to take pictures because we’re on top of the mainstage set and design union rules apply. But photos wouldn’t have captured these anyway. As Ani DiFranco says, they have “the kind of beauty that moves.”

• Lilly on that ridiculous tricycle waving to the kids in the audience, who wave back excitedly like they’ve known her for years (and they sort of have!).  I think I could’ve watched that for hours.
• Wilson and Chester on one bike, circling the stage in wobbly camaraderie, pointing out Ithaca locales as the bullies sneer from the cliffs
• Matt H. transforming the internal struggle of Lilly in the Uncooperative Chair into complex, impeccable rhythms slapped and clapped on his body.
• The magical, nearly-ecstatic Store Clerk waking up the mannequins at the beginning of the Purse Dance.
• Lilly’s baby brother Julius being shot to the moon (ie, Matt P. running across the stage in a red onesie with spaceship in hand) then joining the full company for the Purse Dance Finale.  My heart aches imagining it!  Oh Hillary Duff, sing it! “I have somewhere I belong, I have somebody to love!  This is what dreams are made of…”
• Three words: Slow. Motion. Cartwheel.
• Mr. Slinger’s “Walk like an Egyptian” move to Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA.”
• Garland (the annoying cousin) trying to be included in the fun at the end, finally asking with real heart – “Can I come too?” In my head I always called this moment “Garland’s Redemption.”

I could go on, but I’m already veering awkwardly towards the self-laudatory, ugh.  Truthfully though, very few of these moments have much to do with my ideas – the actors (and our amazing choreographer) brought so much creativity, joy, investment and talent to every moment of the show. I’m grateful to have worked with each one of them and sad that our brief time together is over.

For a director, tech week is all about making choices.  This sound cue or that sound cue?  Should the actor enter from upstage right or upstage left? Unlike in the rehearsal hall, where things are frequently provisional and exploratory, tech week decisions feel intensely final. And no matter how collaborative a director may be, the proverbial buck must stop somewhere.

Some of the distinctions are so slight!  Its like when the optometrist flips the lenses in front of your eyes and you can barely tell the difference: “A?…or B?” “B?…or A?”

I remember once a directing mentor telling me that you never direct the play, you direct the doorknob, the sock color, the emphasis on the word “love” in “I love you,” and so on.   A vision is just the collection of a thousand tiny little decisions, some seemingly unimportant, but together creating a world.

I’m lucky to have such great collaborators making decisions around me for our production of Lilly.  Julie’s costumes are delightful.  Her talents as a designer emerge from every little decision she makes; I don’t have to direct the sock color because she’s already five steps ahead of me. Doss demands even more perfection for our set pieces than I do, which is somehow surprising to me as I’m usually the one requesting nearly-invisible finishing touches. Michael, our choreographer, has an an amazing eye for precision and makes strong choices at every turn that support the storytelling and character development of our piece.

In tech week, it feels like everything matters.  Another directing mentor of mine holds that, when asked a question in rehearsal, a director should never say “It doesn’t matter,” even if the question seems utterly unimportant. It’s fine to say “I don’t know,” or “I don’t know yet,” but never dismiss the decision. The potential for world-building exists in every choice, in every step, in every moment.  We can’t let these opportunities go to waste!

Of course, sometimes I come back down to earth and realize that what I’m deciding here is whether the grown man playing a baby mouse dressed in footie pajamas should or should not bring his macrame baby blanket with him for the final twenty-second dance number. This might not be a life or death decision.  But then again… who knows where any chosen path may lead?

I leave you with something sublime and something ridiculous.  I find the sublime and ridiculous often go well together.

Here is me (in Grammy Mouse’s hat) with Patrick, Hilary and Ian.  This is during our publicity photo shoot on the Ithaca College lawn. Four peas in a pod!

And here is the classic but still refreshing poem by Robert Frost about making decisions.  Lena, one of our wardrobe supervisors, recited half of it on Sunday as we trampled through the woods at Buttermilk Falls, literally trying to choose which path to take. There’s so much here, but what is resonating with me today is the notion that we should always allow our choices to be guided by real desire, real love, real curiosity.  Both paths may seem nearly equal, but your instinct pulls you inexplicably towards one.  Sometimes I think the trick to being a good artist lies in learning how to heed those subtle pulls with greater and greater sensitivity.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Today marks the beginning of our last week in Ithaca.

Yesterday, on our last day off, half the lab company and the three directors went “gorging” – we went to three waterfalls in one day: Ithaca, Lucifer and Buttermilk falls. It was a  truly elemental day: the sun blazing onto the shining rocks being pounded with rushing water, wind in our hair.

After months of working together, I finally feel like the amazing people in the lab company are not just our collaborators but our friends.  I feel lucky to have such friends. Everyone needs friends you can scream at waterfalls with.

It’s hard to think about the summer ending. This has been such a beautiful and magical time.  But, as my Buddhist parents taught me, everything is ephemeral. Or, in the words of Kaufman and Hart, You Can’t Take it With You.

Today we enter tech for Lilly.  I’m so lucky to be spending my last week here working on a play about the joy you can find when you embrace your community of family and friends,  and the growth that can happen when you share with them life’s good and bad experiences.

In the immortal words of Hillary Duff, one of the pop songstresses featured in the sound design of our show, “Happiness is a mystery.  It’s here and now.  It’s you and me.”

It’s been raining all day – first gently, then misting, then torrents, then humidity so heavy you wish it would rain again.

It’s the end of the second to last week and emotions are swirling like the weather.  I vacillate between never ever wanting to leave  this strange green Ithacan paradise and desperately missing my loved ones and the bustling cities I’m accustomed to inhabiting. I’m starting to feel sad about leaving, and continuing to miss the people and places from which I’m so distant.

Tonight we head to the opening of “Penelope of Ithaca” on the Mainstage at the Hangar.  I haven’t read the script, so I don’t know what’s in store for us, but I’ve always thought of the story of Penelope and Odysseus as the ultimate tale of longing.  Loving someone faithfully over great distances without any proof that they’ll return to you seems simultaneously sad and noble. And mostly sad.

Tears have been closer to the surface lately in the Lab Company – myself included.  We’re all quite professional generally, but intimacy grows in environments like this, and I think the vulnerability we’re able to share with each other is a sign of our strength as an ensemble. What a watery world we live in here – lakes, waterfalls, rain and tears.

Here’s a poem by Edna St Vincent Millay about Penelope and tears. It’s also, not coincidentally, about love and gender, two of my favorite topics. What do you think? Did Ulysses cry?

An Ancient Gesture

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.

And more than once: you can’t keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don’t know where, for years.

Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.

And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,

In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture,—a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.

He learned it from Penelope…
Penelope, who really cried.