It helped that I knew Andrew McCarthy was also going to be in it.
As a regular at Naked Angels' Tuesdays @ 9 cold reading series, I'm used to seeing a lot of works for stage and screen in their various stages of development, from bewildered infancy to full-grown adulthood. The one question you always have to keep in mind is not "What is this piece now?" but "What will this piece be?"
In the case of The Apology, the production only suggested certain elements that would be in the final product - some multimedia projections, strategic lighting, a bit of blocking - but because the actors were still on book, and tethered to their musical stands and binders, in many ways, the script really had to speak for itself.
But when you see a play, or a film, or a TV show, or a scene in life passing before your eyes, what determines your reaction to it: the script itself, or the players' interpretation of the script?
After all, there are a million ways to say "I love you" or "I have to go to the bathroom."
So a performance of a work-in-progress like this requires a huge amount of imagination on the part of the audience, who has to work just as hard as the actors to create a world that is so much more that what's presented before them. And for humans, whose natural inclination is to take things "at face value," to see them "as they truly are," this is a difficult job.
In the music industry, artists, managers, and A&R execs are constantly playing new songs, potential hit singles, for the marketing and PR staffs, often with the caviat, "This isn't mixed or mastered." For anyone without studio experience, the ears and the brain have to collectively strain to extrapolate what this song might sound like, what it might be once in the hands of an engineer and mastering studio. But a song - not only the underlying composition, but also the base recording of it - can sound very different when given to different teams to finish it off.
How can all these versions be the same song?
Likewise, how can different casts, different touring companies, different theaters, different directors be putting on the same play?
The version of The Apology that I saw last night - with that script, and that cast, in that theater - was, at least, in its adolescence. Eventually, the actors will be off-book, and Andrew McCarthy will no longer be reading stage directions. But what it will ultimately become relies heavily not only on the playwright's future revisions, but the influence of a real director, a new cast, a full production team...Will it even stay a play at all? From the looks of it last night, it could easily morph into dance theater, or, in my mind, film.
I wonder if anybody really knew what I was going to be when I was a teenager. There have been a million choices along the way, a million interactions, influences, distractions, obstacles, triumphs, and failures to create the circuitous path - sometimes back-and-forth, sometimes circular, not always straight-ahead - to where I am today. And who I am today really doesn't say much about who I will be when I am finally fully-formed.
The bigger question for me is, when will that be? When is anything finished? How many changes does it take before you know that it is done? Art, and life, are not like food, which reaches a temperature, a texture, a level of browning, that indicates it is officially cooked. It's easy to identify when a dish itself is overcooked, or downright burned. But with the arts, you can always go back into the studio or the editing suite and work on them more. In the art of cooking, you can constantly tweak a recipe, adding and subtracting ingredients, adjusting measurements and temperatures and types of pots and pans and utensils.
So really, when does anything - or anyone - cease to be a work in progress?
