bbellicose

A friend just sent me an email. Along with the subject line "I miss you, but..." it said,

"I am concerned about you. I am getting emails from you that say they were sent at 4:45 in the morning and text messages that say you sent them at midnight. Do you ever sleep?
Ok. I already know the answer to that question. No, you don't. You power nap, if anything at all.
Please take care. Don't try to exist on diet coke and red vines. ( cause I know you are!)
Please, I enjoy you much more when you are sane. "

Ok, she's right. But c'mon, iIt's hell week! (The final days of rehearsal before opening a show, for all you non-theatre folk) Whatdya expect?

Ok, call me crazy, but I love hell week! I love those moments when everything seems to be on the brink of collapse, but then magically, it comes together. We wonder to ourselves: Have we done enough? Have we over rehearsed? Underrehearsed? Did we think too much about what that reaction to the book meant? Will the audience even undestand the subtext? Are we kidding ourselves about those really intense moments?
For those of you who are Tony Kushner fans, read his essay titled On Pretentiousness. It describes beautifully this moment balanced precariously between disaster and greatness. Here's an exerpt:

Lasagna is about opulence. Lasagna should be garlicky, garrulous, excessively, even suspiciously, generous, promiscuous, flirtatious, insistent, persistent overwhelming exhaustive and exhausting. Perfection in a lasagna ought to be measured by the extent to which it effects a balance between fluidity and solidity, between architecture and melting. It is something between a pie and a mlange, there are membranes but they are permeable, the layers must maintain their integrity and yet exist in an exciting dialectic tension to the molten, oozy, cheesy, oily juices which they separate, the goo must almost but not completely successfully threaten the always-discernible-yet-imperilled imposed order.
Baking lasagna has long been my own personal paradigm for writing a play. A good play I think should always feel as though it's only barely been rescued from the brink of chaos, as though all the yummy, nutritious ingredients you've thrown into it have almost-but-not-quite succeeded in overwhelming the design. A play sould barely have been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been; just as each slice of lasagna should stand tall, while at the same time betray its entropic desire toward collapse, just as the lasagne should seem to want to dissolve into meat and cheese stew, so you can marvel all the more at the culinary engineering magic that holds such entropy at bay, that keeps the unstackable firmly, but not too firmly, stacked. A good play, like a good lasagna, should be overstuffed: It has a pomposity, and an overreach: Its ambitions extend in the direction of not-missing-a-trick, it has a bursting omnipotence up its sleeve, or rather, under its noodles: It is pretentious food.

Golly, if you really wanna get me started, ask me about theatre or writing. I can go on for hours. I had a boyfriend once whom I had to make a pact with never to discuss (in this order) theatre, politics, writing and the decency or depravity of humanity. If we did, it inevitably ended with shouting and tears. On the other hand, it also usually ended in some pretty damn good make up sex...so maybe we had something there...