Pick Your Left Foot Up When Your Right Foot's Down

This is an interesting read.

I'm doggedly applying for some grants right now, even though I don't know what projects are really valuable and I should keep working on and am generally feeling a little eek. I love Angels in America, and the scope of it is so incredible (I've said the same thing about my ongoing lover, Sleep No More), and I wish my work didn't feel so small and insignificant. But then if I write something for more than three people, it might never see the light of day.

This balance between how to make art and then how to get ahead and be business like so that you CAN make the art you want is very tricky and I don't know how to balance it. And of course, just thinking like that makes me frustrated because shouldn't I just create, create all the time, huge things and do it for the sake of themselves, and if no one sees it it doesn't matter?

I can't think that way. Because it does matter. Like Roy Cohn says in Angels in America, 'clout'. You need to be noticed. You can't push into a vacuum. It will suck you right up.

Anyway, that was one of a few inspiring things I've been surrounding myself with. Reread Angels last night. I will finally see a version of it next summer because a theatre company here is putting it on and I'm so excited. It really is a thrilling piece of work. So exciting to see something so big, all those ideas be chewed on like that. Ugh, start small, get big? Go big or go home?

My friend Jenna and I saw a play the other night that wasn't the most inspiring, but we were both kind of wracked with desire to be up on stage. And then we talked about whether it's better to just throw caution to the wind and throw something up and if it fails oh well, or if something has to be good, has to have a certain value or it wasn't worth it anyway. This kind of relates to this big/small debate. Do you do what you can just because you can, or do you wait until you can do something huge, but risk that that time will never come?

Of course, my feeling is to do something impossible immediately, but I get in to trouble an awful lot.....