Breaking the Fourth Wall

Hey, October, what's up? I haven't posted in over a month!

I just had a really great meeting with Gerritt, my TA from First Year Directing. He and I really got to know each other when I crewed the show he directed first semester last year. During second semester I talked to him a lot about what a director's job is and how I could best accomplish that. Tonight we had a really productive conversation about my process as a director and figuring out how to find my process as an actor so I can decide if I'm interested in acting and just frustrated with it right now or if I'm actually losing my attachment to acting and want to focus on directing in the future.

During our discussion I made lots of discoveries, including that I need to use the logical side of my brain to set up tasks for my actor brain to do so it can be creative and discover a character. I approach directing very much from a perspective of figuring out what needs to be done at each moment to tell a story, and I know how to communicate that to my actors. I haven't quite figured out how to do that for myself. Gerritt helped me realize that while I know how to listen as an actor when I don't have text, I need to figure out how to hear as an actor when I do have things to say. Sometimes just having a sounding board is really helpful. It helps to have to articulate things, and also to have them repeated back to me. Gerritt's very good at, "What I'm hearing is..." which is incredibly useful to me.

So. While my artistic identity crisis is by no means solved, I think it has resolved itself into something far below crisis status. It is a question, a quandary, a curiosity, but not anything I'm worried about finding an instant answer to. I have ways to explore now. That's good enough.

THERESA McCARTHY is my second year mentor!!! I love this woman so much, I want her to adopt me into her family. She was one of my acting teachers this year, and always had helpful advice about how to work on my acting process. (Despite any above evidence to the contrary.) My understand is that a second year mentor is there to help you when you feel like you're drowning in work and life and stuff, and to perhaps help figure out ways to answer your questions. I'm looking forward to meeting with her in the next week or so and getting her acting perspective on the question I talked about with Gerritt today. She's incredibly smart and talented and kind and generous. There is such an infinite number of resources in people and knowledge at Playwrights. I'm eternally grateful for it all.

I'm actually in tech right now for Grant's production of Ohio Impromptu. I'm assistant lighting designing, which tonight means focusing a few lights and running and rewriting cues. I love playing with light boards. I'll be in tech for the next two weeks after this too, actually, as a lighting designer again and as a sound designer the week after. So much technology. So little sleep. I love it.

Oh. And I have a five page midterm research paper due tomorrow. It's currently two mediocre pages long. But apparently I do my best writing at 2 am so, great. (I wrote a paper for this class at 2 in the morning a couple weeks ago, and got an A with the only criticism being that some of my sentences were too complex to be easily understood. Awesome. Haha.) Sleeping? Not so necessary for my life tonight.

One more thing - there's a pretty wonderful guy in my life right now. It's a blessing, in a life that's already going pretty darn well right now.