Good rehearsal last night, and some quality bonding time in after-drinks, directly following.
…Digging in deeper every day, and pinch hitting jokes and hilarity in between to lighten the load. If we didn’t, we’d be slitting our wrists by hour three.
The most important point, we all agree, is that we need to “go there” on these journeys with no-holds-bar. So we do. And we will. And it’s difficult and mucus-filled, and then we pause for a break and do it again. Many inappropriate jokes rash the air as we deal with this subject matter the best way we can…like troops spewing black humor as they pick up body pieces off the war field.
Sometimes, you just need to make light of a totally tragic moment or you’ll crack under the strain of it.
…Actors get that. So we will use it, and build on it, and that is how you get a straight woman, a jilted fiancee and a Lebanese walking into a bar.
…The “Lebanese” bit is because in all of the script, (nearly completely focusing on accused lesbianism), no one ever actually mentions the word. Forever in implications and spoken of in twelve different ways, but never pointedly named. So in keeping with the edit of it, I’ve just picked a close-sounding relation, and will go with that.
It’s code.
…In fact this whole script is ripe with “code”…and it’s all up to the team involved, to pick and choose which of it to take up and run with. Thankfully, ours has chosen NOT to go the double-endendre-everything-to-hell route. Especially in dealing with the L-word question.
…Even though, (in my opinion), my character is NOT a “Lebanese.”
In the wise words of someone else, “you can’t fit everyone into a neatly labeled little box.” She doesn’t love a specific gender, she loves a specific person. Who happens to be a woman. That’s all.
…Now, some may see that as a cop-out or unwillingness to face her sexuality and really come out. But this is the way that it makes the most sense to me, and I applaud and embrace it, and will use it as I desire. So there.
…Which is not meaning to take anything away from the overall commentary of the show. However, that is often misinterpreted in my opinion, as well. It is a play about how the power of rumors and hate can destroy people’s lives with ruthless, and careless certainty. Which, I’m sure you will agree, is just as prevalent (if not more so) today, than it was when first written.
…Yes, world of Social Networking: I’m talking to you.
…The fact that the show uses a story of two women and their personal relationship is more of a shock-factor bonus at the time it was written. Again, based off an 1810 court case…which would have been just mind-blowing in comparison to even the 1930′s treatment of it.
For reasons we now know, the author felt a certain personal kinship to the topic matter, using it to exercise some of her own personal demons, and voice her own personal beliefs and commentaries. Which only helps inform the intensity of the piece really…making it oh so fun to mine for gold in. There’s a lot there, and we still have around five weeks to dig in and find all kinds of goodies.
Yay, us 
…And hooray, to our beautiful poster-girls: our sweetly tragic “Rosalie” and evil spawn incarnate, “Mary.”
~D
