My brain has short circuited tonight. But beneath the muddled exhaustion of my poor brain is the undercurrent of exhilaration.
I am thrilled, proud, and profoundly fortunate to be at a table surrounded by amazingly talented people in a beautiful new facility, working on a mind-bogglingly beautiful play.
Welcome to the first week of Arcadia!
Two sentences leapt out at me when I re-read the play in preparation for my foray into Assistant Directing; from Thomasina Coverly: “You cannot stir things apart” when she is describing the action of stirring a spoonful of jam into a cup of rice pudding.
And later, from Hannah Jarvis: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter”.
When I was reading this play I was also preparing for a reading of another play about politics in a small English town. Specifically the members of the council and steering committee of this small village. I was also trying to clock some time with my family before rehearsals for Arcadia started. And I had closed another production the week before. All these worlds, words, individuals and agendas colliding in my mind. As I was reading Arcadia, a profound sense of the connectedness of all things presented itself in Stoppard’s stunning language. And, as all great art does, made me look at myself as a cog in the greater and amazing universe.
“Things cannot be stirred apart”; in Arcadia the characters collide into each other (with wit and passion and love and intellect) and through their interactions – become tangled, mixed, prompted to actions with consequences that ripple through time and excite new drama and hilarity and excitement.
In the rehearsal room, I look around at a table full of some of the most gifted actors I have ever seen, with amazing intellects to match, and at the helm Michael Halberstam whose passion for Tom Stoppard’s work is obvious. You add to this mix an amazing stage management team and construct the whole thing with the best designers and staff… When we start “stirring” something is going to be created that cannot be unmade, cannot be stirred apart. A production of this beautiful play with magnificent language will become something that will combine all efforts and when the last ingredient is stirred in, members of our audience, it will become another living, new, incredible journey that won’t end when that audience walks out the door. They will carry it, stew over it, talk about it, and see moments, truths, and bits of human hilarity, in the days after they leave the theatre.
And the discovery will continue because if great theatre does anything it makes you want more. We’re never going for the ‘end result” we’re expanding the journey. Why do we create? Why do we go to the theatre? “It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.”
Amen, Hannah. Amen. Onward!
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