Double Heart: Commencement

We have arrived!

Throughout the holidays and on into the sudden bright harsh winter cold, I feel as though I have been in a creative holding pattern. The last several days, all three projects of the new year have opened themselves up, like a pale, fragile bloom pushing through deepest snow.

You like that? I am a writer.

Rehearsals for Double Heart began on Wednesday night, and yes it's true: I enjoy listening to people talk about my work as though I were Shakespeare. Just yesterday afternoon, set designer Terry Martin called me into the rehearsal hall to share the set he and his team just assembled there, and to describe to me exactly how it will come apart to pack into the van for the tour.

We are in Messina!

The set is elegant, simple, highly attractive, and will be perhaps the lightest, simplest to pack and move of any set we have used since 2009 when the Chekhov plays utilized the pipe and drape and four pieces of furniture.

Rehearsals for These Are The Times have resumed in earnest. The Big Box series began last weekend, and our historical Cleveland pageant is the final weekend, but that still seems awful close with so much to do ... until I think I need to rehearse an entire other play, tour it and wrap it up before Times even opens. That puts things in perspective. At least it does for me.  

More wonderful still, I threw out eleven pages of Slumberland to be read aloud during Playwrights Unit on Wednesday. Not such a big thing in the large picture, to have a few odd pages read, but there is something warm and reassuring about knowing what you wrote -- especially when it is packed with dream-shifting nonsense -- is something people can follow, holds their interest, even makes them laugh, and wanting to hear more.

So far it is, as Eric S. put it, "True to its own world." I think that is something I am good at.

"I am afraid of this performance."

We had a brief discussion about plot, and how plot can or cannot work within a dream. The first stage things are just "happening" with little rhyme or reason, though there is a goal, a basic goal, not an all-encompassing goal, but something to be accomplished before we can move forward. But is Nemo aware of that, or is he just be taken along for a ride? And is that all right?

We commence. We proceed. We move forward, in this and in all things.