September 12, 2008

Morning. The modest 6 storey unfinished building across the street is a wall of windows, a fishbowl, in which I can see workers scurrying about their business. They look happy. People will be happy at work if they are given half a chance. Some of the men I know already by their walk.
What I thought was Prudential was John Hancock. The tops of the buildings disappear in the morning mist.

Anna Livia Lucky in Her Bridges had her first preview last night, to a surprisingly abundant house. I got there early and had a drink in the bar across the street, a coke, to settle my stomach and to prevent the rebellion of peristalsis in the midst of things. The bartender is a scriptwriter just returned to Chicago from a disappointing jaunt in LA. He asked how I got a play at the Bailiwick, and I told him.

"You mean you just walked in and handed them a script and they decided to do it?"

"Mailed it in, actually. I’m from North Carolina."

He thought for a moment and said, "I guess you just have to have the product."

He decided to try his hand at playwriting, and we discussed for a moment the difference between the stage and the set.

Met Kevin my director and Peter his cupid-resembling assistant and David Zaks the producer in the lobby. Liked them all. Kevin is very theatrical, and speaks like he’s speaking lines. I like that. Zaks is an original. I know no one to compare him to, except perhaps, on several points, myself.
The experience of the play at first preview was surprising, satisfactory, in many ways far better than satisfactory. That it is a joy merely to see ones work performed needs hardly to be said. Timothy Martin, Des, is dramatically beautiful, and an excellent actor, and in one sense he got the Irish down splendidly, but in another sense was a little too comfortable with it, and part of the time he simply could not be understood–rather like a real Irishman. If he slows down all will be well. Michael Dunbar–also Master Electrician–is electrifying, perfect as Barry. Better than I thought someone would be in that part. Ellen refused the red hair (thus causing the script to be altered) but is a fine, motherly Ellen. S, the actor playing David–the one Kevin begged so hard for-- is not at the level of the rest of the cast, but neither is his character’s spirit up to theirs, so maybe there’s a kind of suitability in it. The major mistake is tone. Kevin wrote quite beautiful cello interludes, but also somber and melancholy ones. After such an introduction the audience is afraid to laugh. The first line is clearly a joke, but it follows such post-Romantic soulfulness that nobody laughs. The play’s central matter is so dark that every moment’s leavening of humor is necessary, and the tone was not set to allow it, the actors not primed to birth–even to broadcast shamelessly–the jokes. At drinks afterwards Kevin asked if he could cut a few lines from the sermon to streamline the play toward its climax. I told him–after making a face–the he must do what he thinks is right–but I was wondering what he’d think if I told him he needed to slip a jig or a lilting hornpipe into his Brucknerian mysterioso to achieve a far great goal. The rest of the story is–like Ann’s dances for Gilgamesh–that the music is so fine on its own that I’m going to find a way to forget that it’s not the best thing for the play.

As I’ve experienced in the past, I thought that if I walked into the theater unawares I would not know I had written the play, so unfamiliar do things become when passed through the minds and bodies of others. This is a very good thing. The experience of watching the play was real to me, learning it as it went as any member of the audience would. The music of the language was, oddly, chastening to me, for I know how to speak like that, and do not, covering what might be eloquence with quips and bawdiness. It is a gesture by which the heart protects itself, of course, but hearing my own words upon a fearless stage made me think I had taken it too far.

Conversation about Obama in the taxi coming home. The cabbie was a black man in Chicago, and I had the folly to ask him whom he favored in the race.

Finished the night at Dublin’s bar near the hotel, sitting in the crowded space across from a boy who had just won a bet with his sister as to who could lose 20 pounds the fastest. He and his girlfriend were ordering four or five different meals that he could sample from, to end his time of denial. She didn’t like him so skinny, and had been against the bet from the first, and was always abetting him to eat a little more from her plate. I ate a hamburger at midnight, and was neither sick then nor woke sick in the night, so I assume a blessing had settled over all.