Name the Stars and Know Their Dark Returning

Photo credits: Kyle Purcell

Time is doing this weird little trick on me right now. I will feel very in control and that there is time for everything and that I'm doing ok and then out of nowhere I will be overwhelmed with total and absolute panic about how there's no way it will all be done and how I have been wasting every moment up 'til now.

I guess this is also how I feel about my work and my career and everything: ok and positive, I slowly build these good feelings, and then quickly, spiralling into terror.

It's all good. Right?

Kind of weird to be working on a project on this timeline. I'm going back to Sudbury in a few days so I won't be able to rehearse Modern Love. We're going to have a pretty intense period of rehearsal in the two weeks before it goes up (which is standard), but it's also the holidays, so things need to be juggled around, you know, the Lord. It means that we had to get started early, which was great, but now I'm kind of charged up about the show, and things have been percolating for a while and I'm thinking about it and wanting to work on it....and I'm gone.

Gone in a blur.

It's weird to feel like I'm leaving a project that is so important to me right when it's prime time to work on it. And I'm not leaving it. There is so much tech that can be worked on without me, there is a ton of promo stuff that needs to start and I can help with that from wherever, and we've been rehearsing with the goal of giving me a frame work that I can refine and practice on my own. A lot of stuff is drilling, just going over specific movements again and again, and I can do that wherever.

But....we'll make it work. What I'm finding is that we are making it up as we go along, because we just have to cope. All of that sounds as if we don't have answers and we don't know what we're doing, but I kind of feel like we don't, and that's the way it is. It's not a bad thing. Everything is an experiment.

I was complaining to someone the other day and, LIKE A JERK, I said, 'Why can't everything just be easy?' And my friend looked at me as if I was the biggest asshole ever and said, 'Why should things be easy? And if they were, wouldn't you find ways to make them difficult anyway?'

Touche.

So we cope because things are never easy and they're never going to be easy and that's it. I'm going to Sudbury at a totally inopportune time, and that's just the way it is. And we don't know how to solve problems, but we will. Maybe it isn't possible to put together a show when your only actor has to be away for a chunk of time but WE'LL FIND OUT. Maybe it isn't possible to write a good play in which a major character is a computer screen that types out his lines, but WE'LL FIND OUT.

It's all just a big question, and maybe that's the attitude I should have as an artist, maybe it will encourage me to take bigger risks and make better art and take criticism as another exploration rather than something to shut me down. If all of this not knowing and wondering can make me open up, shut up like a telescope, as Alice says, and not fall to pieces, well....that would be something.