St. Hat Tricks Day

I just stubbed my toe. Walking barefoot to the kitchen barefoot after having gotten home from the theater at about 12:30am, I accidentally kicked the edge of...oh, never mind. I'm in pain.

Okay, I'm over it now.

I just talked for a while with my lead actor after a decent performance of my play, and looking back at my history at Playhouse, I'm so glad that this was my last conversation with an actor in that theater. There has almost always been one actor who stays late, the one most eager to learn. Over the years it's been people like Vito (the absolute opposite of the word "lazy"), Suzy (the most talented actor I've ever worked with), and tonight it was Amalia, the person who goes beyond the word actor and achieves that definition that is beyond most actors' reach: she's an artist. That's everything I aspire to be, from my first conscious breath in the morning to the moment I close my eyes at night. It comes as no surprise that these three people are the ones whom I attribute my experience to, the ones who made everything worth the trip I've taken.

I guess this is about the magic number of three. At the beginning of this weekend, there were three performances left. When I was done (for the most part) as director tonight, I sent three of my actors home, or to a bar, or to wherever they were going on this holiday. I even had three crew members tonight. The real questions is, as I write on the third Saturday of the third month of the year, is this play the way I want to finish a career at Playhouse West? Is this the best I've ever done?

I have to say...that the answer lies with the audiences. I will never feel like it's the best thing, because I always want more. As my distant friend Iulia says, "more and more, always". I work my actors hard until closing night, and then I will, as I've learned how to do through repetition and experience, be satisfied with the outcome. It is what it was always meant to be.

I love the process. I love the moments of clarity, of pure bonding with artists and that understanding of what we're doing. Whether or not the audience gets it is kind of irrelevant. In this chapter of my life that's closing, I committed myself completely to the actor, to making sure that they are different on closing night than they were when I first saw them rehearse. I know I haven't reached all of them, but I worked my butt off through each and every performance. Back in my college days, I gave extensive notes to my two actors in a black box theater when I made my directing debut with "Two and Twenty". Tonight, with two performances left, I gave my final notes at Playhouse in a black box theater to two of my actors, and then one.

That actor is a musician an an artist. Those are three of my favorite words.