Crucible: Done

This could be long.

Normally I don't tell too many folks about this blog. The fewer people, the more I can write without limits. This is my little place where I can vent frustrations. But more often than not I find myself erasing a lot of my vents, for all kinds of reasons. I'd read them back to myself and think, "woah, kid. Take it easy." Sometimes I'm too self-absorbed. (HA! An actor calling himself self-absorbed. Welcome to redundancy, people.) Sometimes I fly off the handle. Sometimes I just don't want to be so damn negative, so I pull a lot of it down. The few things that stay are usually well reasoned and really reflect my frustrations. When they're directed at someone I know, and if that person happens to be you, please only take extremely small offense. I've probably said it to you before I put it here. Most likely if you keep reading you'll see me write something really nice about you, too. I try to appease the karma.

Current readers, help me out. Am I a prick?

On to the The Crucible...

The first weekend was, honestly, a slight downer. Performances were good. Great, actually. But I never got the idea that our audiences were pulled in by it. The comments that my friends made were sort of positive but never really hit praise. That's fine, I prefer honesty above all else. But I couldn't shake the feeling that we missed it somehow. Maybe we made each little piece so shiny the whole didn't hang together. (Does that even make sense?) Thursday morning's show did nothing to help. Sitting at the front of the house was about sixty 11-13 year olds. I can only imagine what I would have been like having been forced to sit in a chair for an hour and a half at a time to watch subject material that they probably couldn't have cared less about. They got pretty shifty, and there were plenty of conversations I could listen to from the stage. It was a pretty good rehearsal at least.

So we come in Friday night and I don't know if everybody felt it but I definitely sensed as a group we were looking to find that something. That something turned out to be our last three audiences.

They were incredible. I've found that doing a comedy is easy to gauge an audience. If they're laughing, you got em. Drama, though, is way harder to gauge. You have very little cues to tell you if your audience is getting it. Not this weekend. You could hear the tension, the reactions to the absurdity of it all. Those are the moments you keep.

As Hale, I share the final moments of the play on stage with Elizabeth. Those moments are heavy, HEAVY, HEAVY. Sometimes I felt myself manufacturing emotion to get there. (The school show, definitely.) Last weekend, thanks audience, didn't need to do a thing. Also, a huge thanks to Nick, the fella who played John Proctor. Moments I never had to make happen usually centered on him. He played Proctor with such awe-inspiring talent I was honored to have shared the stage with him. With all of them. Anyway, normally, his last moments on stage are for the audience, and for his wife. Last performance, he looked at me for a very small time.

He might as well have kicked me in the chest. Not a whisker of acting there. In my head, "Ah crap, that sonofabee got me. I'm gonna cry like a baby." Crying, open weeping, might or might not have actually happened. And that moment wouldn't leave. I go down to the green room post curtain call and I'm just standing there when Tess, our Mary Warren, comes and gives me this big hug because she watched it from the wings for the first time. I think, "Damn, again."

Awesome cast party. This is a show where with such a big cast (22) usually there's someone in it that you don't click with. Not here. Both on and off stage everyone got along with each other fantastically. Even putting up with me. This experience has been truly, overwhelmingly positive and none of my complaints or qualms are gonna stick with me as long as the gratitude I have towards these people.