One more day!

I guess you could call this 'Like a Sack of Potatoes' eve! At any rate tomorrow we put it up in front of people, come what may. We have been working this thing and working it hard. Now it's to the point where it's starting to feel like a real good fit. No more little demons lurking in the back of your head saying - you don't really know what comes next do you?

It's starting to feel organic, like something that should look easy. The only bummer is one performance and out, but this is gonna be a spring board to other things I think. I do think LSP and Old Hickory would make a satisfying evening of theater. After the reading of LSP last spring people thought the two characters were too close but after working on the piece this guy has grown into his own person. He's smarter than Jimmy in Old Hickory, for one thing. Also, Jimmy is acting out of a sense of desperation kind of, seeing only one way out of his problem; where this guy is much more intelligent, in an intuitive kind of way.

I think an evening opening with LSP and then following with OH would have a good trajectory too. LSP ends with a certain level of intensity and the OH opens with humor . . . before the worm turns . . . it would be a great one-two punch. That's what I was hoping for, to find something to have as a curtain-raiser for Old Hickory . . .

But ... we have to get through tomorrow's performance first!

May I say something about my director on this piece? Bette (my wife of course) has really taken what I thought would be a guy sitting in a chair telling a story and helped me give it more life in many ways. We have found some physical life that I think adds so much to the piece and we've basically treated rehearsals as a laboratory for exploration, for seeing what works and what doesn't. Almost all of her ideas have been good ones, and while I may have been resistant to some, I usually came around to seeing the wisdom in most of them. No surprise in any of this of course; she is a theater person and knows if as well as anyone I know. I'm in good hands and trust her . . . otherwise I'd have never asked her to do this. She has directed me before of course, so I knew what to expect . . . I'm going to go on that stage with a very strong foundation.

Would I have liked more than two weeks to learn the piece and work on it? Yes. But we put the hammer down and have gotten it done!

I've been very very lucky with these solo pieces. Wallace and Bette are very different in many ways; but they both share a love of theater, more than that really, a reverence for theater; and it means more than I can say to have people like that in my corner. Theater is a temple for all of us, the place we feel most ourselves and at home.

One of the images from the rehearsals up in Woodstock when we were working on Old Hickory, was the first day in the Byrdcliffe Theatre, when Wallace just wanted to take a moment to sit quietly in the space. You gotta love someone who loves this stuff as much as that.

That love of theater is one of the first bits of glue that bound Bette and I in the first place, way back when . . . it's a wonderful thing to be able to share, and to carry on stage with me.