Last rehearsal at Theaterlab

All but one of our rehearsals have been at Theaterlab on 14th St. Nice place. Nice people, reasonable prices. We can't rehearse there Monday and Tuesday because they're booked up! Bummer for us, good for them. They are very reasonably priced and convenient . . . Carlo is a Living Theater alumnus, so he has been around for a while. They do all sorts of performance stuff there as well. His partner in crime, Orietta (I think) is a dancer if I'm not mistaken. Anyway, they always made us feel welcome and if you need space in the city, I would give them a very good recommendation.

I'm not going to rehearse OH at home this weekend. I'll probably work on lines some but that's about it. I'll save the heavy lifting for rehearsal. This time next week I suppose I'll be wondering what the hell to do with myself, but I will have this summer in Woodstock to look forward to. I can also build it back up to closer to an hour. I cut some stuff that I really liked from the play to make it fit the festival's time requirements, and there are other aspects of the relationship of our hero to the other characters that I could explore or flesh out . . . so I won't be sitting on my hands and while four months seems like a long time, it'll be here before you know it!

It should be interesting to see how the piece morphs over a run of several performances. No two will be alike, I would bet the ranch on that!

One thing I had been thinking about researching to write about next is the mid-70s text book wars in West Virginia. Then I hear on WNYC that there is a radio documentary this weekend about the very same subject and that Trey Kay, the doc's producer, was gonna be on Leonard Lopate's show to be interviewed. Well, Trey Kay and I did the Fantasticks together in West Virginia, way back when. He was fresh out of college and trying his best to 'act'; very earnest and really wanted to do well, and he did just fine in the role of the young man; not long after that he moved to New York. But something about him didn't sit well with the director, Tom Murphy. I'll never forget one time he was back stage before a rehearsal vocalizing, and Murphy (I'll have to blog about him sometime!) said to whoever was sitting near enough to hear: Would somebody go back there and kick him in the ass! Another time Murphy told him: Trey, you've had about eighty hours of acting classes in college and we're seeing every damn one of them; STOP. ACTING!

Murphy was priceless. If I can figure out when that doc is being broadcast and don't get involved in anything else, I might have to listen.