Hey... I was so tired I barely remember what I said at the last meeting...seriously! Jeremy if you are referring to check in.... I thought that was a time when we could speak our mind without feedback.... to enter into the meeting without baggage... know that I never know what I will say in check in and I am not editing my words.... just releasing whatever comes so I can focus on the meeting at hand.

But since I am on the subject...I do feel, often, what a special thing we have at Son of Semele when I am directing. I also feel it when I am acting. I also feel it at the end of almost every meeting we have. I also feel angry about it sometimes....and exhausted and happy and sad and frustrated. That seems par for the course with all things associated with the theatre. The Son of Semele is a trickster God after all, capable of soothing wine and violent earthquakes, of ecstacy and awe. I always expect theatre to be hard, complicated, difficult, and occasionally sublime. Working with this company for the past several years has been hard, complicated, difficult, and occasionally sublime. It has also taught me alot about myself, some other people I care about, and more about the theatre. But I find that theatre always burns a bit. Semele was destroyed in fire after all.

I suspect all this is a reflection of my current state of mind four days before The Mysteries opens. I can tell you that I spent eight hours in our theatre last saturday and when you see the show I hope you notice the hatch marks on the woodwork in the theatre..... I did that!!!!!!! It is a grand thing to be a director but the confusion of theatre, for me, lies in the fact that the greatest thrill I will have next Friday evening will probably come in an odd moment when my eye wanders to one of those hatch marks and I secretely congratulate myself for a job well done. You put a brush in paint and make a series of lines and it suggests a weaving pattern. It is simple and predictable. And the satisfaction I receive from doing that work will probably last for a day or two. My relationship to the production will, I am sure, haunt me for the rest of my days. They usually do.
Blessings

I got a comment, nice! In regards to check-in, I didn't think I was betraying any sanctity of feelings brought up last week at the meeting, though that is what I referenced, because those feelings have echoed through every production we have had. I hope everyone reads the blog for the positive that I intended it to be. The "awe" was in reference to all we have done. During the pre-production for shows I would always find myself feeling frustrated and disappointed because it seemed like it was always the same 8 or 9 people doing everthing. This is nothing new for anyone that has been around for a while to hear. And that started to happen again this past month. It's hard enough to get a job done with just the weight of that task on you, then you add on the weight of that negativity and for me I finally saw the extra wall it was creating. That's when, like I said,I was in the theater and I saw what we had created and I said, "F*@k it." This is just the way it is, if it changes great, but if not, look at all we have done. The people that are doing the lifting, and I see that group is growing, have done an incredible job and that was what I personally was going to focus on. Because it's working, SOSE is working, and to focus on anything else means I'm not appreciating what has been done. The blog wasn't a critique of the way ANYONE else has handled anything. Maybe someone or everyone in the company has already realized and experienced what I just did. I don't know, the point of it was what I had fianlly found. And finally, my hats off to our core team for this show, Michael, Paul, Matt and Edgar. I think it's going to incredible. It's a huge challenge for us as a company, logistically and artistically, and I think based on that, we have risen to it on all fronts. And Michael, I actually saw your painting touches yesterday, before reading your blog. Finely painted cross-thatches sir. Finely painted.

Perhaps you meant to write "buste",not "boost".

Perhaps you meant to write "buste",not "boost".