Monday evening harried, sweaty and in need of a bathroom, I walked into an open rehearsal of  Flipside to find a group of students and possibly Hollander residents sitting in wait for the play’s run-through. Bathroom emergency taken care of, I walked in more relaxed only to notice there was another lag. Alas, there was no real action going on and I was a bit frustrated about it. As a writer blogging these experiences, I’ve also had intermittent moments of frustration trying to explain the actors’s experiences to you, having my content questioned here and there, so forth and so on. Using my voice to represent someone else definitely comes with many challenges… particularly since the play opens tomorrow night, the director and actors are a bit antsy, and I come away from a rehearsal feeling as if I have no content to report, because “CUT!” is yelled so many times and the director and stage manager are particular about every nuance.

This evening, the cast paced back and forth, some did warm-ups, others went over their lines amongst themselves, a couple sat around… plugged into their iPods or what have you, perhaps trying to get in a particular frame of mind.  Quite frankly, I can’t stay for the duration of the evening rehearsals a lot of the time, and so I leave… feeling agitated with very little content to write about.  I looked at the tech crew as they chattered amongst themselves (Ricky included)… and wondered when the proverbial show was going to get back on the road. This particular evening… exasperated and all… I stayed. I inched closer to the stage to listen to Cindy launch into her first spoken-word piece of the performance. I weathered the lag and am very glad I did for I got to see the play’s entire run-through and it was extraordinarily good!