Third Show Down!

Today we had our third performance. I had warned the kids not to expect another sold out house, and not to expect an effusively responsive American-style audience. In the end, the house was more than respectably full (no one sitting in the worst seats, but all the other sections full) and they laughed a lot more than I was expecting. True, I'm always taken by surprise when people laugh at my scripts, but I was unprepared for the response.

We are always very keen to dissect the day's shuffle after each show. While we talk a lot about avoiding 'a bad shuffle,' we cannot really define 'a good shuffle,' leaving me to wonder whether that exists. They all work in their own way. Some scenes landed in strange places, but others showed up back-to-back in useful ways; we watched Little Augustus die in the muffler, then immediately after saw Amanda write a note to warn him to stay away from it. What we took away from this shuffle is that if the audience is willing to enjoy the ride at the beginning and just take it all in, eventually the threads of storyines start to pay off. And while some of the minor bits and pieces don't land in certain shuffles, on other days they do. We had one day where the two mentions of "cossacks" in the play were close enough to each other to elicit a noise of familiarity.

Today there was a moment late in the play where the audience errupted in a huge belly laugh.

Bailey's character says: "I much prefer wondering whether I might be kissed than to actually suffer being kissed." In the audience, there was a cluck of tounges, a sigh and a soft "oh no." They had all laughed themselves out during the round-robin-romance scene, and were somewhat upset to think she didn't necessarily enjoy being kissed. Brooke's character responds in the play with "that is the saddest thing I have ever heard." It's the way that Brooke says it; a thoroughly contemporary delivery that cuts through the preciousness of the moment, which caused the audience to bust into guffaws.

I obviously can't re-create in prose why that moment is funny when played in a live theater. But looking at all the pieces that go into it underlines the joy of this most collaborative artform. Brooke and Bailey alongside the rest of the cast use my script under Tim's lighting while wearing the costumes and walking the set to make a room full of strangers laugh. It takes all of us.

We have had such a wild and invigorating process of learning these past three weeks. I think it's safe to say that every single member of the company has grown and learned something about themselves as an artist/performer/audience member/teammate on this trip.

We've only got one more show left, and then this weird experiment of a script will bow for the last time.

Here's anther thing about live theater: the ride ends whether you're ready or not.

#edfringe #Fringe #performance