Opening Night! (EXTRA CRITICUM)

March 12, 2009

Opening Night!

Just a friendly reminder: It’s OPENING NIGHT for On the Night of Anthony’s 30^th Birthday Party…Again…and I hope you have tickets for tonight or some future date.

I wrote the first draft of this play two years ago. A particular moment in my life. And it’s curious and strange feeling to see this play coming to life, it’s a little bit like looking back on my own history—it’s like a diary entry from its moment of first creation.

And because it takes a time to bring a play to the stage (through the rewrites, the readings, the development, the rehearsals, etc.) that moment of first creation gets further and further away, until…I don’t know….well, it feels curious and strange to see a play that WAS you that maybe NO LONGER you.

The author’s relation to material is always different than an audiences. An audience is experiencing it for the first time, but the author has experienced it so many times, in so many different ways.

Last year, I had a show called Umbrella produced. The piece is very critical about what urban life does to the human soul…not the comedy my mom was hoping for…and the piece was first started in a dark period of my life. An audience member came up to me and told me how much they were moved by the play, which was great, and I knew that intellectually, but, in a weird twist, I was surprised. I think it was because I had moved on. I wasn’t…invested…emotionally in this play anymore. I wanted it to succeed, I still do, I think it’s a good piece of work, as is On the Night of Anthony’s 30^th Birthday Party…Again (buy your tickets now: https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/643085) but the work seems outside of me now—something I did, not something I’m doing.

What am I doing? I’m working on a new play: New Horizons Through the Interplanetary Medium. I just had a reading at Potluck Plays, thanks to Heidi Handelsman. And it was great to hear and to find myself in this spot now. Whatever spot that is...

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