I am pacing every room I inhabit with a bright yellow script -highlighted all to hell- as my companion.
The script is fast becoming mutilated. They always do.
…I fuck up a line, cuz I forget which tense she’s in now, or which version of name-dropping she’s on, or where the hell that one line even comes from -which is why I keep forgetting it. So: I let a string of expletives burst out from self-frustration, and start again.
…I’ve been doing this for hours, every day. Since Monday.
…And I am very, very happy.
This is the kind of thing that makes theater people look like freaks. I know that. As much as I know that fighting with that yellow script over words, is an awesomely frustrating and gratifying kind of brain-foreplay right now. And my escape.
I used to hate this part: getting off-book. I’ve decided that I don’t now…and maybe never really did. I wanted the words right away so I could get to work. Only, that was part of the work. The agonizing over every word choice and its place, just as much as the playwright once did…this is where the relationship work starts.
…Why can’t she stick to a goddamn topic even within any three sentences in any one monologue?! She’s like a bee, flitting from flower to flower without any structure whatsoever. And then all of a sudden: she’ll bounce back to that one flower over there again, or that one over there, with no transition of thought, and no complete communication on any story she starts, at any time.
…My God, she is frustrating to track.
…And that’s gotta be exhausting as hell to live like, you would think. Always amped up about something, always chattering away about another, always splitting focus as many ways as possible, so she ultimately doesn’t say much of anything, until all at once: she explodes for what seems like a totally superficial reason.
…Trying to track and learn her words, I feel more empathy for her fellow characters than herself.
…Sitting down to book-work of WHY she is like this –in between line sessions — I’ve become her insider-champion.
…In between: I’ve got a lot of damn work to do. Which is fucking amazingly lucky. And so this weekend, I will continue to pace and recite and yell at myself and her and Horton Foote, as the bastards we all are for putting me in this situation.
…But in all the good ways.
…Which is the only solace I’ve got at the moment with a fucked-up car transmission and no money to pay for it.
I work ten minutes from home. I can borrow a car for rehearsal commutes. Mine hasn’t totally blown up. As yet. But it will. There’s nothing I can do about that. Which helps me mentally: not at all.
…My brain this past week has been pulled from here to there, with worries, frustrations, anger, hyperventilations and total fears …absolutely just as erratically as Jessie Mae in this script has.
So: from where I sit now, here’s two things I know–
1. If I keep myself busy enough to not think about it as much as I can, maybe I can delay the inevitable from sucking the absolute life out of me, in the mean time.
2. Horton Foote might be a fucking genius.
~D
