March 30, 2014

Icy snow on the ground. I don’t recall any prediction of this.

Yesterday was obliterated by the fever. There was no pain and little distress, but also I don’t believe I was awake more than an hour at a stretch. Recovered thank God before the show, and I think we did well for the six or seven people in the audience. Asheville is actually a horrible place for the arts, however it accolades itself otherwise. Lots of lip-service, little real support or effort of understanding. I remember after attending that rather awful production of Cabaret trying to account for the praise it was receiving. No one had actually paid attention to what they were seeing. Cabaret was Broadway, so we loved it whether we did or not, whether there was anything to love or not. The audiences simply were not seeing what was there before them.That is sweet magic when you put up something shoddy and famous, bitter magic when you put up something hard and wonderful. Our Shaw is neither shoddy nor wonderful, but a great and famous play–never before done locally and probably never again-- deserves as many people in the audience as there are actors upon the stage.

Terrible sound of wind around me here in my attic office. The lights flicker. I tremble at the thought of the sweet gum coming down at 62, the great pine at 51. Property is a terrible thing.

A single bloom on my deciduous magnolia. Yesterday, anyway.

Amazing clarity and omnipresence of dreams. Dublin has been in many of them, such as this morning, when dream time ended with an extended effort to get to Dublin through a long cement train tunnel, the train, inexplicably, having to stop short of the station. I was traveling with Nick Morgan. I’ll be sitting or lying down running lines in my head, when I’ll cross the border into sleep, and I’ll still be running lines, but they’re from a different play, rich and strange. I fell asleep in my long wait in Act III last night, and when I woke there on an upper floor of the Masonic temple, no one in the room with me, the one sallow yellow light far away on the wall, I had no idea where I was. For a moment I thought I was dead, and my flash was, “Oh. So it’s dreary after all, like the Greeks said.”