I can't seem to turn it off. It's like when a song gets stuck in your head. I get on the T and instead of just sitting back and enjoying the ride, I immediately look around and try to match people up with stories. Or try to figure things out. Like tonight, why the guy across from me with the religious medallions kept periodically sucking his teeth. Or what was up with the kid a few seats down from him, dressed in what I'm sure he thought was business attire--electric blue shirt too big for him and a tie the size of a lobster bib. Put them together and...
Wait. I don't have to do that anymore. As a matter of fact, that's not the way Striking Out the Peanut Man came about anyway, even though for a couple of weeks before I had to write a play for Mill 6's T Plays I would play that game on the T. For anyone who's going to it next year, in the end I didn't find that helpful. It was more helpful for me to know my actors and write for them, imagining them in the situation, than it was to imagine them as real people on the T. And now I know all that worrying was for nothing. It's like anything: You just have to trust your talent that it will come through.
I did a bit of rewriting, just tweaks to lines. Meg Taintor, the director, tonight said it wasn't working for her, and frankly, with Meg, she didn't have to make much of a case. It wasn't working for her, and that was enough for me, and we took them back out.
I'm not even sure when I'm going to see the show now. It opens Wednesday--really a preview, I think--and it's really all up to the actors and the tech people--all of those talented people. Break legs, everyone.
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