miracle marketing

Recently I decided to undertake another play at the theater I have been involved with for the past five years. I had briefly considered submitting a show to direct last season, but I thought better of it given all of the myriad transitional crap that was going on in my life. In many ways a production becomes a short-lived marriage. To pull it off properly you briefly assemble a creative family with whom you live and breathe the piece, and the presentation - whether play, film, or exhibit - becomes an intensely vulnerable housewarming.

Putting together the creative team on my first show was comparatively easy to how my last one ultimately came together. Much like the life that surrounded it, the production was fraught with challenge and precarious dramas.

For all intents and purposes I had to fire two of my friends who were in notable positions but never lifted a finger. My original stage manager broke up with my lead actor and promptly quit the show, leaving us without a co-captain. The assistant stage manager left due to distress and unsettled personal matters between herself and the actor whose baby she was carrying. My lighting designer completely dropped the ball during the last few weeks of production, leaving a scramble to find a replacement that ultimately may have done a better job. For a show with so much demand for it, our effects make-up artist was indeed a late find. To say little of certain key props and set pieces which were still being mimed until the last week of rehearsal.

Yet the show came together for the audience with such overwhelming aplomb that we received unsolicited reviews as far out as Jacksonville and were told it was the best show done in Gainesville in a long time. It was intensely demanding on cast, crew, and in many cases the audience.

So here I am again - back at the bottom of the hill. Anything worth doing has its share of challenge. With the current climate that has followed such a drastic change of social orbit and the ensuing circumstantial dissolution of many a friendship, I have found myself with the thankless task of attempting to cull together a team for my new show from fragments of the ones that came before and plenty of individuals I barely know and ones who I am hoping will emerge from the woodwork.

The process is slow going, but steady. The auditions are in one month. The show opens in fourteen weeks.