Hurry up please, it’s time
Hurry up please, it’s time
My Billy is starting his own theatre company, of sorts. It’s a bit like the Neofuturists (ie Too much light makes the baby go blind, or whatever) in that the company creates a series of short pieces and performs them. Not necessarily related but definitely relevant. For a long time, that was what I thought I wanted to do. I did a month-long, all day, every day performance art workshop my sophomore year of college. It was so intense that by the end of the month I felt like a completely different person. Suddenly, I knew what I wanted to do. That was the reason I became a theatre major. That was the deciding factor that tilted the scales - and it’s why I’m here today, doing what I’m doing. It was such a godlike experience - taking these incredibly, incredibly personal things and being able to purge them in public, and have people not only SUPPORT what I’d put out there, but offer a standing ovation in return. That experience turned my life around, quite literally. (It was the official end of my Bachelors of Music in French Horn Performance, at least.) So, anyway. Since then, I haven’t had a chance to tap into that sort of primal, visceral, creative, theatrical force. I haven’t had a reason to.
Anyway, back to Billy’s group. For the auditions, two pieces are required. One original, one not-original. And, of course, my brain has dissolved into panic. I don’t know if anyone besides me has read the book Girl, Interrupted, but there’s a section in there where she describes the way her brain works. People would imagine that things are moving slowly in there, as nothing seems to really be coming out. BUT, quite the contrary is actually true. She has so many minutae constantly dancing in her brain that it’s nearly impossible to pull out just one thing. So, what may appear to be writers’ block is, in fact, a veritable idea invasion of such vast proportions that I’m just terrifying myself. I sit and think “What about this? or, hey, what about THIS?” until my head spins, and my page remains blank. I cowrote a half-hour-long piece with such devoted focus that I nearly lost the rest of my life, and now that I’m trying to create three minutes of…anything… I find myself lost inside my own brain. So, so silly.