I Can't Believe It's Not Shakespeare

This Sunday, ICBINS plunges head first into a new piece of text: When You Die You Go To Target by our blog master supreme being, Chiara Atik.  If you missed it, Chiara wrote up a great piece on what’s been spinning through her brain leading up to the reading.  I know the anxiety that comes with presenting an unfinished product to a group of people, especially people you know (which may be even more difficult).  You trust them, you’re expecting something from them, and whether they come back at you with positive or negative comments, it damn well better be helpful, because hell, that’s why you’ve been tinkering so much!  You want your baby to be perfect.  Mommy luv baby.

Reflecting on my own artistic trials got me thinking of the weight on other people’s shoulders, which in Sunday’s case, will be my own.  In a perfect world, a Sunday morning reading would involve me kicking back, sobering up from the previous night, and awake enough to bring up random plot points in the talkback discussion.  While this may end up being true pending Saturday night’s activities, I’m feeling my own pressure: a responsibility in helping another show get off the ground.

Everyone involved in a reading has to be cautious.  The presenter has to be open, they have to take criticism, they have to think outside the founded ideas of their play while at the same time sift through comments that take the play in the wrong direction.  It’s a tough balancing act.  The audience is in the same boat.  You have to be gentle, but not easy.  You have to watch actors with little to no preparation tackle someone’s work, and you’re not allowed to dock points for poor performances.  It’s about extrapolating and divination, forseeing what the product would be like on stage, or how it could be if “x” was different.

Woof, I’m exhausted already.

But, it’s also a heck of My favorite part of working in theater and film is conceptualizing and tinkering with my collaborators.  There will be one image/character/action/moment and all of a sudden everyone’s barreling in a different direction.  It’s that flexibility, or that need to be flexible, that makes the collaboration of a reading both stressful, visceral, and exciting.

Whenever someone in my family needed to be adaptable, my Dad would always say “be a Gumby.”

Can’t argue with that logic.