human behaviour.

Summer has come and gone. The boys of summer have packed up their gear and shuffled back to reality. Yesterday was the first day of fall, as well as the opening evening of my play. The appropriately titled Hell Week did not fail to meet its inherent demands. My last minute set doctor, if you will, came down with what was thought to initially be strep throat. My sound designer continued to miss the mark, offering half-hearted cues, leaving me to assemble everything show worthy by myself. And my lackadaisical stage manager decided to finally bring her 65% to the party as well as loads of very unattractive personality hues. Every tech night of the week felt like a marionette show of a sort, as getting people to communicate with one another without my urging or to notice obvious problems without my shining a light on them became all too common.

For this whole show I have been spread thin holding my faith in others, but then spread even thinner as their investments were shown to be fleeting. If I knew I would need to do nearly everything from the beginning, including in some cases doing actual basic thinking for people, I would have prepared many things prior to the point of being nearly too late. I gave my cast a black-out night on the evening before the show. I was not fully satisfied with the results of our full dress rehearsal, but since only one of the actors had become privy to all of the odds I have been working against this whole time, the last thing I wanted to do was keep my cast around while final touches were being put to the set and the tech department. Overworking my actors or letting their morale or energy levels waiver too much works against the success of performance and the show in my mind.

Our first night's house was medium-sized and reasonably responsive during the performance. We got a slew of exceedingly positive critiques. The cast nailed their performances, and as expected pulled out punches I knew they were saving for a paying audience.

The basic structure of things as they ran were the weakest points to me. My stage manager could not find it in her heart to put the board president hat away for the evening. Her concerns were not related to being a stage manager, who would warm up the theatre before everyone arrives or stay to ensure everything is wrapped up properly, but one who sees the few things she does as a piece of cake. She quite often leaves remnants of said cake behind for others to sweep up. I feel she wears figurehead titles, and for some reason people can't see through her weaknesses with power, control, and leadership. We opened house late since she forgot the tickets, although the way the bookkeeping is done here chit marks work just as well.

And then she wanted to curtail my pre-show playlist to get rolling with show, even it was her fault we got the late start. I have very definitive ways I set tone and mood in my shows, and for those arriving early it plays through the set and music, which specifically had its own share of problems besides. I like to take an audience on a voyage of sound, color, emotion, meaning, and full of dramatic umami. Our first audience experienced it with an immediate hiccup and dead air, equivalent to when an actor clearly forgets a line and stands looking awkward and out of character, or when wonderful comedy occurs and everyone bites their lower lip in an effort to keep from laughing and embarrassment ensues.

I don't know if it was that the show wasn't ready for an audience or if I just wasn't ready to let it go. In ways I felt my baby was being tended by some incompetent teenager. I have been working so tirelessly that the point of exhaustion has been left behind many miles ago. Instead of attending opening night, I should have been wrapped up in blankets, getting more than my of late allotment of six hours of shut eye.

I have high standards. I have invested blood, sweat, tears, cash, time, and effort on this production, and since it reeks so well of my soul I have equally high expectations for it. I think I look forward to night two far more. I have never had a show that was not completely ready for show on opening night. This puts my cast and my art in a very vulnerable position. This has been the most challenging production I have undertaken to date, but in so many ways my most satisfying and certainly the one with the greatest learning curve. Leave it to putting on a show about human nature to truly discover endless variations on the foibles programmed deep within us all.