Rereading THIS: An open letter to the cast

We’re about to plunge into tech. Our rehearsal process has been a touch fitful, with snowstorms, commercials, work schedules, etc. and I know that everyone is starting to feel the pressure of our increasingly imminent previews. BUT, take a moment to step back from the minutiae of the six dozen different things we each want to get done before Friday and remind ourselves about the story we are telling.

Rereading the script at night is always a sort of liberating experience. Instead of trying to watch each rehearsal with fresh eyes, I can return to the imaginative play that inspired my choice to begin with. I reread This twice in two days and there are a lot of challenges the play presents. Our task is to integrate on the whole. Hours have been spent in utter, critical minutae (who’s drinking from what glass when, etc.) and in feeling out the style of the play. This is heavily linguistic, comic and dramatic, often simultaneously, and working with these different demands can cause you artistic whiplash. But here’s what I think:

The contradictions in this play are what make it a great evening, and are the very heart of the experience of watching This.

This is about the tensions inherent in all the myriad contradictions of being human. Our theatre industry too often presents work that is too pat, too safe in its boundaries of tone, of character arc. Too distilled. That’s not this evening. The play is messy – like life – and complicated – like life. We need to trust the shifting sands that Melissa has built. On rereading the play, I am struck by a few things:

These people are highly educated. Just like most of us. :) They are very smart. Not MIT specialist smart, but well above competent. This doesn’t mean they don’t do stupid things and make bad choices. So do we. But there is a lot about these people that suggests they lead with their heads more often than their hearts. In fact, I think they distrust their hearts. Jane’s heart keeps misleading her; much of her problems in the play have to do with her uneasy relationship with her own emotional life. Her denied needs for intimacy, for trust, for friendship, for grief have her not so much twisted around as ricocheting back and forth. Tom’s heart tells him he loves Jane, but he mistrusts his own desires. Merrill believes she should be happy and fulfilled as she embarks on this new journey as a parent with Tom, but her heart tells her to flirt with Jean-Pierre. Alan’s heart is demanding a life change, and for the first time, his intellect is failing to instantly provide an answer.

So, one of the key dramatic tensions in the play is, oddly, the characters working against their own instincts or judgements. We’ve all been there. In many ways, the characters in This are their own worst enemy. There is no antagonist, no external obstacle. The characters aren’t working against each other, which I think can feel a little odd to the traditional “Who is preventing me from reaching my objective” acting class trope (what I wouldn’t give in life sometimes to have a concrete enemy), Melissa’s characters are confronting the weight of their accumulated life choices, our universal suspicion that—at some ill-defined point in the past—we’ve created our own less-than-optimal present, and might face a potentially bleak future. That our situation is in large part attributable to our own actions, and that we need to deal with and control the consequences.

Before hitting forty, I kind of thought that a mid-life crisis was a sort of dramatic deus ex machina, a way of arbitrarily creating crisis in plays and novels that you didn’t have to explore: So-and-so is having an affair, character X is recently divorced, character Y is finding their job unfulfilling, blah blah blah, and... GO conflict! But we all evaluate our life choices and (sometimes) feel compelled to make big changes. This is about, in part, that dawning realization/fear that we can’t just amble on indefinitely. That life isn’t forever, and that we need to be active participants in our own existence, not just passengers.

And then, of course, it’s very funny. Which is an exciting mix; rue + laughs might seem contradictory, or it might really be the heart of our human experience. The dialogue is so quick and so smart and so intricately built, that we need to manage the technical demands of the comedy, the overlapping naturalism of the group scenes and the time for the real human interactions. It’s just a lot of logistics to juggle. But, over the last few days, we’ve found the real key to the dialogue. Simplicity. We have been packing a lot into each of these moments. Performance is about the experience of letting that reality play in you, and creating something new and fresh every night. There is a spareness and lightness in Melissa’s diction that we need to trust. You’ve felt it; consider those times in rehearsal when you didn’t control your reaction, you weren’t playing to a pre-written score, but where the conditions of the play and your fellow performers resulted in exactly This.

It’s going to be an incredibly rewarding experience to perform, even more than to explore in rehearsal.

It’s going to be a true and memorable evening for our audience. Because I really really do love this play, and you are going to love performing it as much as I’m gong to enjoy seeing it.

See you Wednesday,

jw