Twelfth Night

Tonight, I will do my first performance in an Equity theater.  The Colony, in Burbank, to be exact…it’s a very nice space.  And I am excited.  And the show is good.  It is not the absolute best possible production of the show, but overall, it is very good.  We are all pleased, including Armin.

Rehearsals have been a blast.  I have made friends and learned stuff.  It’s interesting being the newest, youngest member of a company — sometimes people treat me as though I’m just part of the group and always have been, and sometimes they treat me as though I am very young and do not yet know anything much.  All of these things are, in their own ways, completely true.  What is also interesting is that people seem to think I am talented.  I like that about them.  Particularly Armin.

He is…really quite remarkable.  Brilliant, literate, with a dry sense of humor that matches my own.  Most strikingly grounded, most strikingly kind, with a coiled-spring-type energy that bursts out of him in explanations, adjustments, and his own every-day movements.  Tactful and sincere.  He’s the perfect director, the perfect cross between scholarship and practice, and he understands acting better than most of his actors do.  He is a very great pleasure to be around.  My father asked me once whether, if he were unmarried and all other matters unchanged, I would enter into a relationship with him.  The answer I gave him was yes, although the truly accurate answer is that there is no version of the world in which Armin is 57 and unmarried.  If he were not married to Kitty, he would be to some other worthy lady.  No one that wonderful who is interested in love could get to 57 and still be single.  And I know Armin is, as a person, interested in love, because of the way he talked about it in hours of discussion of Twelfth Night, a play that is very much about love.  So.

The other exceptional person I have met working on this show is Lisette.  She got my part.  I anticipated being at least quite jealous of her.  But she’s really too wonderful for that, and we are much alike in important ways.  We are geeks and fantasy readers and have similar senses of humor.  We borrow each other’s books and TV shows and such and debate which of Guy Gavriel Kay’s novels is the best (she subscribes to the widespread but inexplicable belief that it is Tigana).  I tell people jokingly that she will be my first lesbian lover.  (I am foiled in this aim by the unavoidable fact that we are both straight.)  She’s also very talented, and is completely doing justice to the show.  Which is good.

I have also become friends with a man called Jeff, who is gradually pulling himself up out of a nasty depression brought on by a sudden and ugly divorce.  I think I sort of take care of him.  I think he sort of takes care of me.  It’s a good system.  He’s playing Feste, so in the play we’re brother and sister.  It works.

Last night we did a speed-through of the play in funny accents.  It was a very good time.  And then I put in a bit of musical direction for the last song in the show.  And then he sent most of us home…I think he’s still tweaking some of the Viola/Olivia scenes.  (Because our Olivia is miscast.  It’s kind of awkward.  Debbie, our producer, told me last week that she wished I were playing the role…and sometimes I do too.  I certainly understand the role better than Tally does.  But oh well.)  Anyway, before I left, Armin came over to me and thanked me.  And while I stumbled over a confused response something like "For what?", he repeated, "Thank you," and walked away again before I could tell him that, whatever it was, he was most welcome and I’m sure it had been a pleasure.  And I have been puzzling over this.  For the musical direction?  I hadn’t really done enough for the gravity of his thanks.  For taking the role of an extra and working hard to turn her into a person?  (An effort, by the way, in which I seem to have succeeded.)  That could be it.  More likely, I think, for doing it with smiles and good grace.  I don’t care how few lines I have, I’m still having a fantastic time.  My mother suggested the thanks may just have been for getting him.  This is possible too.  Danny says that an actor who speaks the director’s language is very valuable — he has to translate into each actor’s own language so they understand, but I understand him effortlessly.  This is why I have hope that he will cast me again.

Also, Danny is working as a production intern for a man named Richard Foreman — the same man who cast and directed Armin in his first Broadway show, back in the ’70s!  I haven’t had the chance to tell Armin about this yet, we’ve been too busy with the show being, like, right now, but I’m hoping to tell him tonight.

Anyway.  The show is good.  And I’ve had fun.  And I’ll be really, really sad when it’s over.  But I intend to make an effort to stay in touch with Lisette…and I hope very hard to encounter Armin again.  You never know.  It’s possible.

Up next: Romeo and Juliet.  That seems to be official.  I don’t know who my Romeo is…I just hope it isn’t Steve, my Claudio from Much Ado.  He’s a great guy, but his teasing and his jokes get on my nerves, and it would be a lot more fun to have a Romeo I found attractive.  Less safe, though, I suppose.  I actually expect that it probably is him.  Oh well.  Unless he doesn’t have time — he barely has time for Twelfth Night.  Perhaps I shall escape.

In other news, Yom Kippur was interesting this year…I’m finding it harder to believe that I can be cleansed of all my sins for the past year, and those I’m not cleansed of are recorded and encorporated into my fate for the coming year and are therefore already dealt with as well.  As I begin to believe more and more in the Pagan concept of karma, the Jewish concept of atonement begins to make less sense.  Although certainly repenting in the Jewish form is still a morally and spiritually good thing, and therefore still sometime to be done.  But it’s not the same.  So I took the time for a different sort of cleansing.  I asked whichever god was listening to help me let go of the anger I’ve been carrying for the last couple of years; anger at my teachers, at some of my friends, at my mother for no very good reason, at myself for faults discovered and wrongs done.  And to an extent at least, it worked.  Every time I find myself going back to the old anger at Craig or at my flatmates in London, I think, no, it’s OK, we let go of that, we were cleansed of that on Yom Kippur.  And I find that the anger I was expecting is gone, with something else left in its place, something that is not quite forgiveness and not quite pity but fairly close to both of those things, and something that is a lot less heavy to carry around inside.  I feel lighter than before.

The day after Yom Kippur was the Autumn Equinox, called Mabon.&nbs

p; I did a solitary ritual in my back yard.  It was really good.  I felt capable of it, in tune, honest and open and inspired as to what to do next, for the first time in such a ritual.  I am so used to having the words and actions of a service set down for me, memorized by years of repetition.  Creating my own rituals does not at first come naturally, and the idea of making up a song on the spot as an offering to Brighid used to scare me terribly.  But in fact, in the moment, if it’s right, it’s easy.  As easy as it would have been when I was a child, and not scared to not know the melody to a song until I sang it.  I am also finding that I can sense the energy of a space.  In fact, I have been able to do this for a long time, possibly always, I just didn’t realize it until very recently…last week, in fact.  It is the same sensitivity that allows me to be aware of spirits.  We were rehearsing in Debbie’s church one night last week, and I was getting that old light-headed sensation that I was so worried about a few years ago, and I went into the sanctuary because there was no one else in there and it was dark.  And the feeling was much stronger in there, but I got used to it as I spent time in the room, and I realized that I could feel that it was a holy place.  Not my religion — not either of my religions — but holy still.  And I could feel that because it was full of energy, more than is usual for a concentrated area, and I finally put it together that I always get this feeling in places I can expect to have high concentrations of energy.  In haunted spaces.  In holy places.  In graveyards.  Almost always backstage, at any theater.  That’s what it is — it’s a way of sensing energy.  Not something wrong with my body, not something a test will pick up, which is why none of them did.  But not just in my head, either.  Hah.  An answer.

It’s been quite a good week.  I love my show, I love my cast, I love my religion, and I am looking forward to going to Las Vegas with everybody to do the show there.  Even though I hate Vegas.  The cast is on a mission to persuade Armin to come with us to Quark’s Bar.  He says he’ll be too busy but that we should definitely all go.  I don’t think we’re going to let him off that easy.  In fact, Armin used the word "Quark" yesterday for the first time in the whole time I’ve known him…and he very nearly managed to get through a whole conversation about the bar and Ferengi customs and the character’s family without ever using the name.  But not quite!  Ha!  I somehow feel like I’ve won something.

Yay.  All is well.

–Stephanie