Thursday, April 06, 2006

Thursday: Cold Interferes...

.... with ordinary life and with the 5 different voices I do in the course of "Talking To...". I'm raw and raspy, and some of my speech has missing or distorted notes, places wher ethe voice just isn't working properly, like a piano where jam's been spilled on some of the keys.... I'm downing various "natural remedies" like vitamin C & zinc and even the discredited ecaenasia, and steaming my nose and throat in a mini-sauna device. Yuk.

Some of the people coming to the show apparently thought it started at 8 instead of 7:30. They entered very noisily, at one point walking directly between me and the person in the audience I was directly talking to-- a disruption that had everybody in the audience focus on that event rather than on what I was saying. I felt strongly that Secretary of State Mo Mowlam would not have let rudeness pass unacknowledged, and the impulse to ad lib something like... "We'll all wait while you find your seat, darling".. was very strong. I didn't, because we'd never discussed quite this in rehearsal-- we had discussed incorporating an individual verbalized response to one of our in-character questions-- but never ad libbing through distracting movement. I took a small silent pause and soldiered on-- but I still feel an ad libb was called for. Director Carmel is in Ireland, where she'll be starring in a Dublin production of Mari Jones' "Women On The Verge of HRT"-- so I won't get a chance to ask her opinion of what the "right" reposnse would have been....

Playwrights' Platform has selected my short play "Christmas At Grandma's: What Big Teeth You Have" for the summer festival, and I've asked Lau Lapides if she will direct it.

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