Omaha 6

May 27, 2015

Thought I had awakened late, but instead there is a blazing sun in the sky, and for the first time things look as they ought.

Hobbling home after rehearsal last night, stood in one spot and watched (or rather heard) the nighthawks wheeling above me. From the Midwest I miss nighthawks and red-winged blackbirds.

Though the second lead was absent and 19 pages went unrehearsed, last night’s rehearsal made me feel better about the enterprise. It will fly, and the merits or demerits of the event will be mine rather than (as I had feared) the performance’s. M is inexhaustible and detail-oriented, but labors certain points in an odd way. Her across-the-board insistence on beayTEE rather than beauDee and the like gives the show a precise and inappropriate conservatory feel. These kids are English-as-a-second language factory workers. Though she claims never to give a line reading ( I do; it saves time) she will tell an actor how to pitch a syllable, where in her voice to place the syllable, how must uptick to give to the ending pitch. . . all notes I would not tolerate, but which beginning actors (as most of mine are) apparently will endure. No great performances, but uniformly good ones. I note that, of all my plays, this one relies least on bravura skills from actors, so all that came to even keel.

Saw two excellent plays yesterday, one about a driven career artist who unexpectedly becomes pregnant, another based on the supposition that Hamlet did not act on his father’s entreaty, and it’s thirty years later in Elsinore, and Hamlet is marrying Ophelia and Fortinbras’ daughter. Didn’t expect that one to work, but it did. Terrible melancholy during the artist one, as though my own whole life were in review, and found, to my own shattering surprise, wanting. Rehearsal allowed me to miss what was apparently the gawd-awfulest piece of crap that anyone had ever seen. My roommates came through the door rolling their eyes. It was meant to be the crowning achievement of some cherished local playwright, and perhaps it was.

Do not like sharing a bathroom with strangers.

Everyone is convivial, approachable, and if there are cliques, I do not feel excluded by them.