30 Days of NYMF Day 2: The Children
By: BWW News Desk Sep. 02, 2006
No, it is a self-imposed ban—though
unprotested!—for about three rehearsals. They're staging the
last chunk of the play: honoring, violating and ultimately improving
my script. The actors' every twitch and inflection conjures
on my face—that unmistakable barometer of authorial intent!— alternate
expressions of agony and ecstasy.
The irony of this show being
called The Children is not lost on me. Hal, the composer
(and the more diplomatic half of this duo), likens rehearsal to letting
the kid go off to school. And the school we've chosen (nay,
the one organized specifically for this little tyke) is—from our producers
all the way down (or up?) to that girl from Bennington with all the
piercings who made photocopies for us all of August—the best in the
county. But what happens if, on the WAY to school, the
bus passes through a cloud of radioactive waste from a leak at a nearby
nuclear power plant and the children's fingernails turn black and
they roam around in a zombified state, microwaving people to death with
a hug? I worry about these things.
But my facial expressions,
my facial expressions—they have caused me trouble all my life!
Sometimes I think on Leroux's phantom of the Paris Opera House (note:
good idea for a musical?) and wonder if I too should toss some acid
on my face and wear a mask. And carry a rose. I certainly
know now what my mother felt like on that languorous summer afternoon
as she lay helplessly on the beach while my infant self, wading in the
Mississippi, was suddenly ripped apart by a shark. (The lower
half of my body was not originally mine.)
Will the critics be those same
sharks or the dolphins that ultimately came to my rescue? Or will
they not show up in this figurative Mississippi at all?
Why am I so anxious?
The first three-fourths of the show looks better, sounds better, feels
better, smells better, tastes better than anything I'd imagined.
Why would the last fourth be any different?
I'm going to rehearsal today!
I'm going to burst into that room, halt the proceedings and go up
to every single person individually and tell them that I'm happy they're
there, that I believe in them, and that it'd be a lot funnier if they
said the line like—NO! No, they'll figure it out. They
always have in the past. Always. In the past… three weeks
that I've known them.
Faith. Trust. (Faith?! Trust?!) What's this? Valium? That works, too.
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