Singing Loudly

I'm officially back from seeing a little bit of the workshopping. It was very exciting to get to meet the people, see their passion, and guide them on my thoughts of where characters should be drawn from.

I arrived in the early afternoon (thanks to the time zone change) to be picked up by one of the actresses, Maggie. She took me by her house so that I could put my stuff down and then off to their company. The play has two couples and Maggie will be playing the wife in the minor couple. She's 23 years old and has just recently graduated from UCLA. She was actually fairly shy and liked to talk about all the different flowers she loves. It was funny, because she knows a lot about it, yet I know nothing. Her father grew flowers for a living.

When we got to the place everyone else was there discussing the play. They seemed, strangely enough, to be in awe of me when I got there. That only lasted a little while, and I soon heard all the changes they thought should happen. I was, however, treated with a lot of respect and had a really good discussion with them about my vision. That said, I did agree with some of their arguments, so I will be making a few changes.

Then they assumed their roles and started to act out different scenes for me, so that I could see how it works on the stage. The leads are held by a 34 year old guy named Mark and a 31 year old female named Janna. I believe he went to a smaller school in Oklahoma and she went to the University of Arizona. They both fit the roles exactly as I saw it.

After watching some of this they tried to encourage me to act a little. I alerted them to the fact that I have little acting talent, but they twisted my arm. I agreed to play out one of the scenes and then we'd be done.

I guess we were at the studio for about 5 hours before we left to get dinner. The director offered to get my meal, but I refused. It was a little authentic Mexican food restaurant. The food was great and the conversation was better. They discussed a lot of politics, theater, and just how they feel they are treated as artists. They tried to convince me that I should join their company as a dramaturg or in house playwright. Law school, unfortunately, would make that extremely difficult.

After that we all went out to a bar and stayed until it closed. Then we went to Maggie's house because she had invited a few friends to come. All told I guess there were probably about 15 people who made it there. I'm not sure who a lot of them were, but they certainly had fun. They stayed around until probably 3:30 and everyone cleared out. Maggie has a couple housemates, but I guess they are in Vegas right now. We stayed up talking, playing silly board games, and doing dumb impersonations.

This morning I flew back home standby. As a result of not sleeping during the night I slept the entire flight back home. The little airplane pillow was not helpful.