January 6, 2010

Epiphany.

Rehearsals had to flee my freezing studio, and took refuge in the Asheville Arts Center. It is warm and otherwise commodius, except for the din overhead, near constant and elephantine, of trampling, stampeding children. DiAnna sounds eerily like Ellen, in her voice quality, the way she reads her lines, even her take on the Irish accent. All my actors are choice, and I delight in watching them, though I fear my presence might be a compromise to the director’s authority, so I’m pulling back from that a little. In Casey, Adam has found an actor equal to him, and it’s beautiful to watch. Trinity was perfect from the first. The actors laugh at their lines, still, which is a good sign. I listen to the dialogue for flaws, and shiver with relief when a line, a page passes without one.

Dream last night that I was invited to a banquet at a home of a super rich family in New York. Turned out that everything as tawdry, vulgar, disappointing, all images of a class ripe for the fall. I went out onto the street and hung out with construction workers, and then I was happy. I think this comes of reading Gossip Girl on the cross-trainer.

Sent out the summary and first ten pages of a play, I Should Warn You I Have a Gun in My Bag, that I had not finished. The theater (in Savannah) called almost instantly for the full script, so I have been working steadily that last two mornings to finish the last, problematic, scene.

Attended the Epiphany service at All Souls, very sweet and innocent– exactly what the Christmas Eve service would have been back home, with the Nativity story read in halting juvenile voices and children dressed as angels and shepherds, and on all fours as very impatient sheep. Afterwards came the “burning of the greens,” a Christmas tree and a wreath set alight in a garbage can on the lawn. The burning of the greens, at least, was an image out of deep time, and the night was rolled back, and spring brought forward, as by one tugging on a carpet of flowers.