Wednesday night. Open dress rehearsal for Ardor—about ten audience sitting uncomfortably in folding chairs, watching us sometimes stumble, sometimes sprint, through the show. I felt surprisingly calm. Maybe I've just done this enough times that I don't get too high or low for shows with rare exceptions. I used to treat every night of theater like it was the fucking Super Bowl, running backstage, giving pep talks, writing five pages of notes after every rehearsal and show—pissing off the actors usually.
And I don't think there was anything wrong with that per se. In fact, that level of personal attention might have been necessary to keep the work afloat (and I probably need to give more personal attention to what’s happening on stage now). But the deeper problem was that the material I was writing back then was not quite up to snuff; I was in the minor leagues and the frantic effort was an attempt to hide it.1
The thing I like about working in plays, the end is it actually helps you pierce the vast illusions which the heart produces to protect itself. And the work of doing a play more honestly whether from a writing or directing or acting perspective is ultimately the work of shedding illusions—or tunneling under illusions and mining them, blowing them up (which is when the Aristotelian catharsis happens then).
What I’m trying to figure out in this diary: certain relationships between theory and life, certain relationships between anxiety and antidote.
Writers I’ve been dipping into since I started this public diary: Gombrowicz, Leopardi, Emerson, Nietzsche, Montaigne.