Last time I wrote, I said we needed to find the tender, vulnerable heart in this piece, find a way to share this delicate thing in this grand space. Well I think we found it yesterday. And it was hard, but I really think the new material works. I am so relieved! Mark Lord, our dramaturg wrote this following note about tenderness to help us all orient our characters and remember what it is we're doing here:
Think about how to articulate the entire piece: the meeting structure.
Who we are is a group of people who come together from all over the place, mostly from the bottom end of the stick that stirs society. We are the subprime sublime. And we gather in this abandoned shell of a beautiful truth beneath a peeling plaster sky. Because we have faith in some mystery that stirs in us and which we see stir in one another. Hamlet says I have that within which passeth show. And we see that in ourselves, each other. It’s like a handshake so secret we don’t know the grip—only the memory of the feeling of solidarity it might bring.
So. We gather here.
We open ourselves to ourselves. We raise our doubts. We risk humiliation. We incarnate propositions and play them. We could all be leaving this earth tonight—we don’t know…and we seek to revel in our awareness of not being sure. In our sure moments, we incarnate certainty—but we never take it for granted and when it rests on us (horndance) we feel its glory, and its fleeting.
We open ourselves to one another. We tell our horrors and trust our vocabularies are not too…whatever. We hope to be understood.
We open the whole process to the audience. We accept that they may well reject it. They may not want to join, to walk, to stand, to share, to be honest. But our only encouragement for them is our own nakedness, our own good humor. Our willingness to fail. Our strong desire to be together in the light of the setting sun, in the failing light, in the dusk and, eventually, in the snow in the dark.
We should approach each part of the piece as if this coming together, this opening, are never far from us.