Although How Can You Know Who You Are Til You Know What You Want Which You Don't?

This is the last day of tech week, which has brought a lot of changes. Tech, obviously, a set, costumes, and audiences. Slowly trickling in at first, comprised of other team members, who are supportive but still scary in their judgement, and now invited individuals, today a whole invited audience, and then previews.

We can keep rehearsing and making changes throughout previews, so we haven't been set loose yet, but it's still a new level and very scary.

There's a wonderful part of 'Waiting for Guffman', among many wonderful parts, where Catherine O'Hara talks about Fred Willard's encouragement to her as an actor: 'He's trying to get me to change my instincts, or at least ignore them'.

Let's be honest, the whole thing is joy:

That's a little bit how I feel right now. I want to change and ignore all my instincts. I'm so unsure about the whole shebang that I'm not sure what I can trust in myself. It all feels like Jello. I try things and they feel different but I'm not always sure what's good different and what's bad different. And my good is different from what's good for the play, and sometimes that's different than what's good for the director, or good for the script, or good for the audience.

Trust is the most important thing but it's hard to know what to trust. Especially myself. I think I have to have confidence that I will be fine and I will, even, be good, or better, but how can I trust myself when I know what a wreck I really am. How can you believe someone who you see the flaws of all the time?

Trust and doubt in equal measure. Difficult. There are these impossible double things about theatre, that we find the things that work and then we have to find them again, while still letting things be natural and new, that we must question and push but also trust. That we have to have our cake and eat it too.

And then, we strive after something that is untenable, that we can only achieve in glimpses and shadows and gasps that happen once and can't again. And all of these glimpses and shadows and gasps are successful in one way of looking at something that is prismatic in its options, that appeal to one audience member or critic or actor, but that person is only a person, even if they're a person who can ruin your career or break your heart, and what is 'right' anyway, when we're all so deeply flawed.

Last night coming out of rehearsal after three long days I was walking in the rain to the subway and I just started sobbing. Tears wouldn't come out but I felt this intense pressure in my chest that came out as if I was crying. I think it was that feeling of being completely overwhelmed. It's hard to be in a room with so many of the people who made you want to do theatre in the first place, and then to think that you're ruining the play for them, or that they'll never want to let you act again.

I really have been questioning whether I can handle the challenges of this career. I don't know if I have the strength, and I'm pretty sure I don't have the talent. I think, now, that the strength is much more important. I'm fascinated by the questions that this art form raises and what we're trying to do and how we can do it and whether we're successful in it, but maybe I should do it from a different place in the room.... from the audience instead of on the stage.

Doubt. Questions. Tears. Insecurity. Anxiety. Yup. This is what it is before the curtain goes up and we all fall down.

The work today is to work less hard. To let go. To stand backstage and before I go on, just tell myself, 'I'm alive'.

A dance belt and a tube of chapstick: