Leo: Beginning and Ending

Opening night!...

...was embarrassingly long ago. The work was so intensive for a fiendishly long-short time, and once it's up and running and the production team's work is done (though the cast and crew's work is only beginning), the life you put on hold so easily takes over. The blog waits, ignored but not forgotten.

I'm not accustomed to the opportunity to continue to fine-tune a show through previews. My main experience with them is as an audience member. From that point of view, they just look like cheap ticket nights for those who don't procrastinate. (Oh, the Ottawa theatre audiences always waiting till the final weekend to go see shows!!) But of course, previews really are that: pre-views, public showings of the work before it's done. Everyone working on the production was quite clear on that. Certainly, the work was presentable by the time we started previews--we weren't showing rehearsals in public. No drastic changes happened after we went into previews. No massive cuts to fix a flawed production, as one sometimes hears of in monster Broadway productions. We all did our homework well and there was nothing cause us to realize at the last minute that we'd gone about things the wrong way and we had to redo it to avoid a humilation! But still, there was the study finessing of moments, smoothing out of transitions, "squeezing the air out" to help the action to flow and the pace to move. This work continued on. The gemstone tumbler continued its methodical churning.

During this process, with all the elements finally together during the previews, we were finally in the position to say "this is the complete package of what we're giving the audience." I set myself the challenge of trying to forget everything I'd experienced in rehearsal, and to simply see the show as the audience does, "as if for the first time." What would someone coming in with no foreknowledge find too confusing, distracting or misleading? It's a puzzling contradiction that the director (and assistant!) represent the audience, but quickly become so familiar with the production that your experience rapidly becomes entirely different from a spectator who has no prior knowledge of the show.

I only partly succeeded at this challenge. We made one or two small alterations based on my realizations. A couple possible confusions of, "Oh, someone watching this might mis-interpret this line and think the play's about something it's not." But those were fleeting moments, few and far between--Micheline is not one to let lack of clarity sneak into her productions! But opening night was different. With the directing officially done, with no scraps of paper to scribble notes in the dark of the audience, I was finally able to stop being the assistant director and to just be someone watching the show. Others too clearly felt the transformation. Not just in the audience either. The actors had a volatile new energy on opening night that hadn't been there in previews. For them too, having an audience had been one thing, but very clearly Opening Night was a whole other stage in the work.

After a week of Life steering me towards a hundred other things I hadn't had time for, that seems so long ago now. And yet the actors and crew still have much of the run left to do. Most if not all of us will be back for closing night. But will we who finished our jobs on opening night feel like strangers by then?

Perhaps they'll remember that I was once around. Ignored but not forgotten.