When we open tonight....!

Tongues opens tonight.

Aaaah!

Actually, it's not "aaaah!", I have very little reason to be anxious. This tech week has gone extremely smoothly. My set designer worked some miracles on Sunday so that we could plug in the major set piece easily when it arrived on Monday. Our crew has been outstanding - we have a lot of them and they work hard, so even if I try to help with things like clean up, there's not much for me to do because they're so on top of it. My actors continue to be joys, the assistants on this team are vital and have great energy. It's a wonderful group, and I have been humbled watching their attitudes throughout this week. They teach me how to be open, available, and flexible.

I think we have a good show. We were able to get a few people in for dress rehearsal last night, which was hugely helpful. Learned a lot just by having other people in the room. When we did our first full tech run on Tuesday, I chatted with the crew a bit afterward about their impressions, since they'd been hearing us talk about the piece but had no idea what the piece actually was about (this is a very difficult piece to verbally explain). An interesting thing is that one of our crew member is actually a good friend of mine from high school who is now a first year at PHTS. She's known me for my entire "directing career" thus far, as she came to ARGS just when I started to go crazy about directing. She was also cast in the play I wrote for the ARGS One Act Festival 2006 (which I did NOT direct). She made a comment after cue-to-cue: "I wasn't surprised to see that poor guy running around and throwing himself against walls, because of that time I hung-and-dropped from the scaffolding to get a sound for the show you wrote." And suddenly I remembered that I was really intense about having the sound of two bodies dropping at the top of the play I wrote, but the actors plunging onto the stage wasn't loud enough, so the solution was to have her drop from scaffolding (only a couple feet!). (This was also the play that included the two actors throwing themselves against the proscenium arch for an entire scene. I'm notoriously awful to actors.) This was four years ago, when I did not care about sound like I do now and never, EVER thought I would find myself designing sound. Hilarious. There are threads in life that you can't see without some kind of distance. I love how they interweave. What's also blowing my mind is how tangled up I was in PHTS without even knowing it BEFORE I came here. My friend Emily, and Carolyn, in fact (Carolyn being this crew member high school friend of mine), went up to New York I guess it must have been my senior year, and saw a production of Hair that Sam, another high school friend of ours, was in at NYU. I was sickeningly jealous that they got to see this, not only because Sam was in it, but it was this crazy version of Hair where everyone wore all white and shaved their heads. I thought that must be the coolest thing of the world. Little did I know that the director of that production would become one of my teachers (and honestly, I consider him a mentor of mine by now). Or that Sam would end up TAing a class I was in at PHTS, or that Carolyn would go to PHTS as well (though by that point I was applying to NYU as PHTS-or-bust). The director of that production and Sam are, I believe, both coming to see Tongues tonight. I love all of this. This is why I do feel there is a design, there is some kind of pattern to the world.

Anyway.

Tongues. Got some encouraging feedback Tuesday and last night. It's strange, we're doing crazy things, and I know when we do critiques in Directing Seminar that when we get to the question, "What was the story you saw?" there will be wildly varying answers... or silence. (secret: I'M NOT INTERESTED IN STORY FOR THIS PIECE. Journey, yes, story, no. We've done a lot of work to craft the story not so the audience can know but so they can trust us and follow.) But I saw someone immediately after dress yesterday who just said, "I had the best experience," and THAT'S the point. Some will probably love it, some will probably hate it, but this is what we have to offer. I love it. I am thrilled with how it turned out. (I have theories of why it did, which are probably largely unpopular.) One of our teachers asks a question that I hate for so many reasons: "Did you get what you want?" I hate that question, but yes. Yes I did. I can't tell if the world is going to accept it or not, but it's out there.

Or will be at 7pm tonight.

Honestly, I'm barely nervous. I'm healthily nervous and supremely excited.