Time for the 6-Month Update

This is why I suck at friendships I guess. I'm bad at keeping up with phone calls, emails, letters, birthday cards and - apparently - blog entries. I knew there was a reason I swore I would not start a blog until I got finished with school. When you're writing because you have to you're less inclined to write because you want to. So, timely updates will need to wait until after my graduation ceremony, which - FYI - will be this coming May. (Keg Party to follow...)

So, tonight was the opening night of my latest project - a new play called "The Velvet Sky" at Woolly Mammoth Theatre here in DC. The process - and it's been a real process - has been a joy. While I've grown to enjoy singing for my supper as long as the projects are interesting and well-executed, my roots are in acting school, and it's been nice to focus on textual work and really investigate scenework without musical accompaniment for the first time since "Monster" at Olney Theatre Center in 2003. ("Twentieth Century" at Signature Theatre was the most recent play on the resume prior to this one, but "investigate", "text" and "scenework" applied only loosely in that case.)

Also, being a new work, the play has constantly grown and shifted over the last weeks, often in response to the work that the actors were doing in rehearsal. It's always fascinating to see what ends up on the page in the end. Having worked on plenty of "works-in-progress" over the years, I've gained an understanding and appreciation of just how collaborative the birth of a new play can be. It's very exciting, and at times disorienting. On a couple of occasions during rehearsals I almost got whiplash the rewrites changed so much from one day to the next. But the brilliant thing is, having explored all the various nooks and crannies of the story, when we settle on a "final" version it is still informed by all of the stuff that has been worked on but edited out. While at times nervous-making (lines need to be learned, emotional journeys need to take on a sort of intuitive sense via repetition), the process is one from which you benefit - and one that isn't always available with established texts that are less malleable and more prone to point you confidently in a given direction. The play has been through a number of very different incarnations over the past month and, as a result, I think everyone in the cast can feel reasonably expert when it comes to the varied emotional lives of their characters (or at least we each have a broadened palette from which to paint).

I'm looking forward to seeing what the critics have to say when they weigh in this week - and hoping it will be enthusiastic. But either way this is one of those projects that has already been immensely satisfying due to a director, a playwright, and a company that collaborated well, worked hard, and made the rehearsal atmosphere productive and unfailingly positive. Increasingly for me, that group effort and group chemistry becomes the defining factor on each project, regardless of the level of objective success a piece achieves. Obviously, it's best when success and creative satisfaction go hand in hand. But the most important is to be able to create work you can feel proud of with fellow artists who you look forward to seeing everyday because of their talent, their energy, and their attitude. That is definitely the case on this project, and I expect it to remain so throughout the run. Because of all this, I'm sure this play will continue to grow and surprise us even in the absence of further rewrites or rehearsals. I'm looking forward to it.

All of this is to say that, at the moment at least, I am a happy actor.