Holy Cow.
Oh, right. Chris Mathews here. I almost forgot.
I’m one of the writers of our next show, Girls vs. Boys. We had our first preview tonight, and I’m still trying to take it all in–or eject it all out. Take your pick, I suppose.
I don’t think I have anything new to share about the neuroses of the playwright on a first night with an audience, nor do I really want to even go there. And truthfully, I’d be fictionalizing for you if I did. This isn’t our first rodeo and I know the score–I know what previews are for–but the nerves come from fearing that the people in attendance don’t. And don’t you dare underestimate me and think I would underestimate you by making this post a moralizing lesson in “what previews are for.” C’mon. We’re way past that.
But previews at The House are kind of a new bag for us. It’s been a luxury of budget and development that’s historically been just a little out of our reach. We have the rent $ to schedule like, three previews before opening, the first one always gets cancelled cause no one knows how to do the dance right, and then the previews themselves are little more than dress rehearsals barely held together by anything more than the fact that we know we can’t cancel tonight because we had to cancel last night. There’s always some breakthrough realization or dragon to slay. And then we get to opening by the hair of our teeth and hope that everything sticks. It’s fun. Hey New Work.
But this season, and with GvB in particular, we’ve been able to schedule and take advantage of a more paced-out preview and response process. We just left our first preview of GvB tonight (we get 6!), and y’know, it went well. It went fine. It went Great! Our cast is kind, optimistic, and has talent oozing out of every pore; the design team is badass and engaged in just the kind of collaborative conversations that make me love working with this company.
But y’know, we’re not nearly done. It’s strange (and can be frustrating if you let it) to watch a show that you know is already out-dated by the list of notes and changes you’d like to incorporate from last night’s run, but haven’t had time to do so (because you have to prepare for the preview–haha, it’s a cruel catch-22). ”Strange” isn’t even the right word, “disorienting” is better, because you’re trying to watch a show that doesn’t exist yet. You NEED the audience there to jolt you back into the present to help you see the show that IS there now. To pull your head out of your ass. I guess to help you fully understand just how much work you still have to do, how much longer your list keeps getting. Aye-yie-aye.
The fear, let’s get back to the fear, shall we?, is that the kind patrons who have come to see an early showing of our work are going to go to the bar and tell all their friends or write on their blog about how awful everything is. (And to the credit of their good taste, there’s still plenty to claim awful.) But I guess that wouldn’t make them very kind patrons, would it? Hopefully they know exactly what they’ve signed up for: to be a part of the show’s development, and that includes getting to see the unfinished parts, the experimental parts. And hopefully that comes with a faith that the really stupid thing you saw tonight in that one scene isn’t still going to be there when the last of the changes has been posted on the dressing room door five minutes before opening curtain speech. At least, I hope it’s not still there. If it is, we should go to the bar and bitch about it.
Wait a minute! Am I moralizing?!?! I’m sorry–I guess that’s the stuff that I need to remember watching previews. And here I am BLOGGING ABOUT IT. AGHHHGHGHG!!!
But you know what? Who needs fear? Scared people, that’s who. Let’s not be scared people. Let’s be awesome people. Because it’s awesome people that come to see our shows.
And now it’s 2am and I realize why they call their blog that. I should go to bed and get ready for all the changes we’re going to make tomorrow (we wrote a new song today and it’s cool!), and cope with the fact that there still won’t be time to make all of them [sigh] before we have our second preview.
I hope to see you at The House.
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