Self-Referential

Last Shot

Show number seven closed two nights ago, which was hot on the heels of show number six that closed on Friday, and show number five that closed the Sunday before, and I am slowly surfacing from a triple dose of play postpartum depression. I feel good about them. I’ve never felt more like a hamster in its wheel in my life but I was, as those small creatures are, completely content to run and run and run for hours on end.

It’s when you take the wheel away that I start to go a little bonkers. Sitting at my scratched mahogany desk, staring at the computer screen, knowing I have nowhere in particular to go at the end of the day, that’s the real work. Getting up in the morning thinking I don’t know if that was the last show, the last shot before adulthood and the mortgage and all the other things you are supposed to have when you grow up. Not to be all Peter Pan about it, but I find myself wanting to leave doors open, to stop gathering things in this already overstuffed apartment of mine, to forget to do laundry until I run out of underwear. It makes me feel like there’ll be another.

Few friends came this time, mostly because the ones who care are out of town. (Story of my life.) Some who were in town kept offering either bizarre or banal excuses – “I can’t sit on the floor, I need back support”; “I had to work”; “I guess I just forgot.” I don’t mind, exactly, but when the curtain call ends and the friends come forth with their flowers and hugs and congratulations it’s a little lonely to be the one wading through people picking up props and set pieces. I don’t do this to be watched by friends, of course, it’s so much more complicated than that, but once, just once, I want some flowers too. (The sweetheart show number seven cast gave me flowers – they’re in the picture.)

Listening to: The Decemberists

Letters Beside Your Name

On the question of an MFA, now being vigorously debated at Salon:

About six months ago I decided that I'd already had enough of working. I don't take well to offices with their regular hours, depressing furniture, endless low-level chatter and foggy atmosphere of I-hate-work-itude. I hate the way my brain whimpers with boredom while there, the degree of familiarity I have developed with celebrity blogs as a result, the half-hearted conversations about mortgages and fertility treatments. By 10 a.m. I miss my apartment and my cat and the world, more generally, while watching the specks walk by on the sidewalk.

So I said to myself, that's it, I'm applying for an MFA.

I should explain that I have a very heavy theatre habit (of the directing persuasion) that I indulge on the side of what some might call a very very grown-up job. Co-workers who learn of my other life tend to be awestruck, wondering how I find the time. I try not to remind them, because it might be insulting, that even the most dedicated professional tends to procrastinate, over-analyse, and otherwise waste time while at work. I keep the procrastinating to a minimum, I don't do face time, I don't care about advancement and I am out the door by 7 on any given weekday while my colleagues are just getting their day started. Every once in awhile the competitive side of my conscience twinges when I leave my officemate to another evening full of research and menial tasks. But without my two-facedness, I think I would have committed suicide long ago. (I do still harbour fantasies of slicing arteries in one of my bosses' offices, leaving as a suicide note, "Please consider this a token of my dedication to [the firm].")

(Another reason I've time for it is that my brain is hard-wired not to sleep before three a.m. on any given evening, no matter the events it followed or those to occur in the morning.)

I've never had any idea if my directing is any good. My friends say so, but they are bound by the code of good manners to purport sincerity in their affirmations. My acquaintances say so too, but I can't help but wonder how much theater they even watch, other than mine. I've always wanted to put my shows in front of someone, anyone, Brantley, Mendes, Peter Brook, anyone who could tell me that I'm on the right track. (And then, by a wild stroke of luck, I imagined I might make it to Broadway.)

So I went out and called the best people I could think of to write me theatrical recommendation letters. I pulled together transcripts and wrote personal statements and made DVD copies of the one show I had on film - it was a pathetic sample, nothing I was even remotely but it would have to do. I read tomes and tomes of theory - including one horrible volume called Theatre/Theory/Theatre. I wanted to sound smart and knowledgeable despite a near-total lack of prior training in the arts. I started reading Chekhov, Ibsen, anything that would make me sound like I knew what I was doing.

Put simply, I began to treat my craft not as a craft, but more like a sorority to which I was pledging. Dress like them, look like them, talk like them and you will be accepted. You will get the magical letters next to your name in the book. The Keepers of Track will know who you are and you will get written up on the marquee and in the Times and suddenly you too will not have to get up in the morning in your fifth floor walkup, but will live in that doorman building in the Village you've been eyeing and all your friends will be "artists" and you can forget all the others.

This is the promise that MFAs hold out. Of the two schools I actually managed to apply to, I've been rejected. The other remains silent.

While I was preparing those applications, I got involved in a number of projects. I've gotten three shows through rehearsal. They are all going up in the next two weeks. Almost nothing I wrote on any application, nothing I read to prepare, nothing I could hear or say or pantomime would ever compare to the experience of sitting in a room with people who have to make a text speak to someone, and who are expecting you to show them how to do so. I imagine the analogy holds for writing, for painting, for sculpting.

I know this sounds self-serving because of the rejection. But I thought there might be something to it that by the time I got the letter I hardly even noticed. I picked the letter out of the box. I felt the thinness of the envelope. I ripped it open, read it, frowned to myself. Then I shoved it in my pocket and went on upstairs, where a sheaf of script notes, a hurriedly eaten supper and a long phone conversation with an actress awaited me.

All the world...

Show number four closed two nights ago in New York. It wasn't, as I kept telling my friends, my best work. Directing is a difficult talent to nail down. I'm never sure of a show before it goes on, and frequently find myself putting on false cheer in those last harried rehearsals, and try to keep my knees from knocking as I gauge what the audience thinks of my work. It's so contingent on them, you see. At the very last second, an actor can take a line, one that you spent weeks shaping and accenting and building into a Moment, and spit it out as an afterthought. And you're standing in the lighting booth thinking it's all over when the audience picks up a joke the lot of you never saw, through all the nights of rehearsing and line-learning and blocking to beat the band. And by squeezing through that blindspot suddenly everybody's back on track.

I read an interview with Sofia Coppola recently where she claimed that she doesn't care if people like the work - I figure that either she's completely lying (because really, then, why not just make movies and play them for yourself and your friends only - art is communicative whether we like it or not) or maybe aloofness is a privilege bestowed on the, well, privileged. I certainly don't feel the same way and my - ahem - nerves were particularly shot this time. I kept waffling on whether people ought to come to this one, emailing people the ad with caveats. This is the price, I guess, of knowing actual creative types and assorted cultural critics - you never know when they'll turn on you. But my friend Richard, a picky type, genuinely liked the show, which was more important to me than he probably knew. Actors live for the curtain calls, but one person whose ear I know is attuned to the above average... that's what I like.

An interview for show number five took place today. The script is lovely and smart - and hey, there's a script, which is more than could be said for number four - but they seem to have other theatre friends, and I'm not sure I'll get it. If not I'm going to have to figure out just how this far this theatre thing can go with me. Am I ready to try and do my own New York show? I feel like I don't know enough actors yet, and casting off Craigslist or something analogous just seems... exhausting. Some days I want Actus Reus back...

Listening to: The Weepies

I take thee, solitude...

I went to a wedding this weekend. My friends, we'll call them George and Martha, are a lovely pair. They said traditional vows though, at Martha's insistence, I'm sure, they were each flanked by both parents as they walked down the isle, and the reading was The Owl and the Pussycat. One half of the extended family was Irish, though they made enough noise to represent both clans. There was water and huge trees and stones and beautiful centerpieces. I was happy for them and I made a speech that reflected that. Well, that and the twelve or so glasses of white wine I'd consumed.

George and Martha are the first of our little undergraduate set to take the plunge. I'd be lying if I didn't say the rest of us were a little jealous, if only of their apparent assurance that they will never be abandoned. I should mention that my last very serious relationship started just when George and Martha's did. Though it flamed out just when it ought to have, almost three years ago, for awhile there we were thought of as couples in tandem. So I can't help, on occasion, measuring my life with theirs, starting from the moment I met John (as we'll call him) and moved in with him entirely too quickly, spent two years trying to hide my own life in his, and then being dumped so abruptly it surprised me when it happened.

Since then, I have been: learned to live with this mental illness I used to think was just "who I was," finished a professional degree, started life in a new city, directed three plays (and am now on to a fourth), become a grown-up entire with a 401(k) and two business suits and bills that are nearly always paid on time. There is nothing I miss about the self that used to drive my significant other crazy with my obsessions, was afraid to do anything so individual and risky as take on a theatre project, and was prepared to just stop being a person for the sake of being "loved." I'm not very good in relationships.

So I know that my path in life is going to be alone, for better I like to think, but solitary nonetheless. There's a part of me that thinks this is great. I don't come from a family that believed much in family. Though I tried my best not to inherit it I am watching myself become the kind of person who tries to surround herself with friends. It's been pretty successfully. I am not alone in the alone in the-universe sense - there are a good twelve non-blood-related people I can call if something happens, and many of them would arrive at my side quite quickly, or so I like to fancy. Maybe that's enough. Maybe I'll be one of those old women people make pilgrimages to visit in my dotage, and I'll hold court with all my friends, who are rapidly becoming brilliant professors, writers, lawyers...

I never know how to end these posts. I'll come up with a trick eventually, I suppose.

Listening to: Patty Griffin.

Waiting for Duane Reade

Last night, I needed some tea. Like every New Yorker, I live within spitting distance of a Duane Reade. (That's a drugstore, for non-locals.) Weedy little things, aren't they? I keep waiting for them to build themselves an outlet at the MoMA. Nonetheless, the wide-ranging product lines (where else can you buy cup-of-soups and a digital camera in one purchase?) makes them mighty handy. So often, when you need something random, like chocolate or batteries or even milk, you think to yourself, I'll go to Duane Reade.

I know it's not wise to do all of your shopping at Duane Reade, even if it were desirable to do so. Duane Reades are sometimes a little dirty and it's difficult to avoid shivering when buying perishable goods there. But their dirtiness is made sort of tolerable by the excessive cellophane and/or cardboard in which everything they sell is wrapped. So you tend not to worry so much about the dust on the shelves when picking out a box of tea.

Most every store is designed in the same way, with a horizontal line of cashiers extending out from the front door. Despite the fact that Duane Reades often have six to eight registers, they only ever appear to employ three cashiers at a time. And if you live in a busy neighbourhood, as I do, and it's full of NYU undergraduate "students" whose chief occupation appears to be shopping, this means that you are forced to budget at least five minutes of unwillingly overhearing an obnoxious cell phone conversation. ("And then I told him to fuck himself because I could get into Bungalow 8 without any of his fucking help! Like, can you be-leeeeeeve that???")

But that's not the most annoying thing. Maybe this is a cultural thing, but it bothers me that people in Duane Reades never seem to agree on how one ought to line up for the cashiers. Most Duane Reades have signs posted saying "Please form a separate line for each cashier" but those are heeded on a purely ad hoc basis. Which makes sense a lot of the time, because if there's only four people waiting to pay it doesn't make sense to force them to pick a line when it's only fair that the first to arrive gets the first free cashier.

On the other hand, if you form a single line, you are nearly guaranteed to get screwed over by some oblivious customer who strides straight up to the cashier from the back of the store. This always happens when you are the second or third person to arrive in line. (As I did last night.) And much as you might feel a childish impulse to complain to the cashier, the fact is that the posted rule trumps you, and any kind of substantive justice you might have tried to establish with the single line is overridden by the formal justice of the rule. (Our protest was limited to a few huffy sighs and grumbles from the woman behind me, and the lines quickly split.)

Ahhh, America. Rights are defiantly held here, thought of as things you wield at other people's expense - rarely things that you decline to wield to help others out. And it seems to be thought as some kind of weakness not to throw them around, as if they might fade away from non-use. It's like a metaphysical sort of body-building. Everyone here wants to lift the heavy weights, so they force the issue on really trivial matters. Like who gets to pay for their candy bar and Us Weekly first. Nice to know they have their priorities straight.

tap, tap, tap...

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