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Well, we've finally arrived at the last weekend of Dead Man's Cell Phone.  I can honestly say that I'm going to miss performing in it.  The whole company has been a lovely group to be around and audiences in general have loved the show.  Imagine my frustration when several reviews came out saying they didn't like the play.  They LOVED the performances but were confused and confounded by the play.  This left me confused and confounded.

This weekend, the ladies room began to explode with rich (debatable) conversation.  Until now, we'd all been buried in our scripts/focused on lines, characters.  Now confident in our performances, we're beginning to gab some.

The show opened last weekend.  We had jam-packed houses for most of it.  The feedback was fantastic.  Lots and lots of interesting commentary and complementary words for all of us actors.  

Frankly, i had no idea how it was going to be received.  It IS a bit of an odd show.  I've taken to thinking of it as a bizarre, hallucinatory, comedy-thriller-drama-romance written with fabulous dialogue that sometimes crosses into a poetic format.  

Tonight is the final dress rehearsal for Dead Man's Cell Phone.  I'm super excited to perform it for an audience tomorrow.  

This play contains way more silence than I've ever encountered with a play before.  The playwright calls for it.  It has taken sooo much to get used to that silence.  It's an interesting device.  So much of this play has to deal with the noise of cellphones...  that juxtaposed with silence is delicious.  I hope the audience feels the same way!!!

Well, we've made it to tech week.   It has been a good rehearsal process thus far.  The only choppiness has come from some actor scheduling-conflicts and sicknesses that could not be prevented which caused some absences...  My character is the link between all the other characters (well, me and the dead guy) and it's no exaggeration to say that I am desperately in need of a few solid runs of the show with everyone present and with lights illuminating our stage-world.

I get that wish granted this week.  

I had a good rehearsal tonight.  I think everyone did.  Things really began to take shape.  

....now, if only i can figure out what I did and repeat.  8 rehearsals left.

I'm 90% memorized...  that 90% is 50% shakey but I am 100% sure that I'll have the other 10% down soon.  I memorize in 3 main ways:

1. Repetition at rehearsal.  Even at auditions.  The more I run a scene, the better I know it.

Ahhhhhhhh.... week 2.  This is always the week when insecurities creep in and start to plague me.  They are a result of not quite being off-book but acting like I am.  This tends to result in a lot of "ACTING."  

I hate this week.  

And now the family begins to form.  I have known the following quote for a very long for a long time, and it never ceases to devistate me. for what it is worth I share it with this family.  It is attributed to the diaries of Emily Dickenson,

"I dream about father every night, always a different dream. and forget what I'm doing daytimes---wondering where he is . . . I am glad there is immortality, but would have tested it myself, before entrusting him . . . Home is so far from home--since my father died."

It's not often that I read the back of a play script and think, "That's the perfect way to describe this play."  However, Charles Isherwood (New York Times) wrote the back jacket for this script and I do think it is perfect: