The Cosmos Responds

Play on! So my director pulls me aside at the start of rehearsal tonight and walks me through the schedule he'd planned out, and asks me if I'm ok with it. Half of my Mondays are free, meaning I'll be able to make most of my Greek Myth classes (sweet!). Thursdays I start at 8 mostly, which means I can go to the start of that class and leave like a half hour early (hopefully). So schedule-wise, it's probably about as good as I'll ever get.

So how do I feel about the play now? Well...a bit mixed still, to be honest. We ran one scene tonight, and I realized something partway through. The way the director described what he was going to try to do with the scene, the three actors are all actually the interior monologue of one photographed individual. So I actually had an explanation that made sense to me, though it was pretty abstract (I think the abstractness is/was unavoidable, though). Because a photograph is an image of a person, preserved; but what if there's some truth to the concept that a part of your soul is captured in a photograph? Maybe that portion of the soul could exist in some sort of limbo, outside of time and space as we know it, and maybe not so much outside of time as existing fully in time, with past, present and future all existing simultaneously. It's weird, I know. But it's a weird show, dammit! So anyways, I had this idea kinda percolating, and I'd cast myself (as the youngest-looking of the 3 actors) as the youngest version of this young samurai, struggling to fit his perception of proper etiquette and what he has been taught that it means to be samurai.

No, I haven't gotten to the realization yet, sorry; I know this is kind of involved. So we're reading through the scene and I'm kind of overlaying this onto it, and the director gives me a note. So I ask him to clarify a bit, mentioning that I have kind of a characterization that I'd put into the scene, and he says he's not all that interested in it.

We did this thing while I was at AMDA called a rhythm poem, this amorphous, abstract vocal/movement exercise. That's what I've decided Sundown is, or will be, for me. It's been several years since I've worked on the technical side of vocal production; this is my chance to get back to that. I think the play is going to be extremely aesthetic with practically no story, but since the director and subject matter is Japanese, there might be a lot of interesting stuff going on.

Yes, I am making lemonade.