Tonight's the final gala, and already some people have left, back to their hometowns, or where they're staying. And of course, most of the first week participants are just a memory.
I'm looking forward to the Gala, which will feature snippets from most of the plays, including a number from our own Miss Fitt (Brett Douglas). I will definitely need a disco nap this afternoon!
As I learned from the people who live in New Orleans, it's a marathon, not a sprint, and I'm glad I've still got a little bit in the tank (at $4.06 a gallon...) for the last night.
Yesterday was an all-theatre, all the time day for me. I'd delivered my postcards, done what touring I felt like doing, and just wanted to sit in theatres all day and be entertained and moved.
I started at 3 with the matinee of "Best Man," a two-hander about a pair of young men from Northern Ireland who were once best friends, and whose paths cross in life-shattering ways as young adults. It was beautifully acted and heartbreaking in showing that the closet and self-loathing can kill, and keep us from the ones we love. If I run into them tonight, I'll tell 'em to bring it over to Midtown next year.
I went to a 4:30 matinee of Dalliances, the South African show that's been sharing space with us at the Teachers Club. Their cast & director & playwright, all young and very beautiful, has been nothing but nice, and a pleasure to talk to and hang out with.
It's a fascinating piece by a strong new voice, Pieter Jacobs, and very well directed by Matthew Wild. They're all about 12 years old. I'm kidding. But not by much.
It's about young people trying to figure out what the hell they're doing with their lives; they're people with looks and smarts, and no idea how to be happy. All the performances were strong, and culminated in a wrenching goodbye to each other at the end, with their lives permanently altered, damaged or ended. And lots of drugs. Drugs kill, guys! Geez! (Seriously, we did not have the kind of shit people take now back in the day...and it's obviously giving people fewer chances to fuck up and get it all back. You can kill yourself much more quickly and easily with what's out there now, and addiction issues go hand-in-hand with self-loathing. Said the woman with a margarita in her hand, or at least I will have one or three tonight).
Back to the hotel for a bath and to change into a pretty outfit in honor of the EAT team. And back across the Liffey to see the show for the first time since Monday. I was touched to see the Dalliances company in the house; they wanted to see our show before their last show. (Late show people didn't have a chance to see so many shows; early show people could usually get to the 9:30 gigs, but the 9:30 people couldn't get to the 8 o'clock shows and still get to their own).
And our show has grown and blossomed and I still consider it a work-in-progress. Have to work on the scene endings in the full-length version. (I've actually written four more scenes for it, based on the stuff I realized is missing from this version). They were alive and beautiful & real and went for broke because it was the last night, and let it all hang out (Karen especially).
And then it was over, and the Dalliances people were crying (yay!) and I took off for my NEXT show, the 9:45 performance of "Slipping," from Chicago. They share the Smock Alley space with "Corpus Christi" and that show runs long, so I sat in the lobby for a bit waiting for that one to let out, and chatted with the director of Slipping and read the placards describing the history of the marvelous old theatre, which was actually built to be a theater, before it became a church, in the 1700s! The back wall of the theater is just that...stones and mortar and bricked up arches that have seen the likes of Sheridan and Peg Woffington and where casks of whiskey were stored and where some of the Dublin Catholics were allowed to form their own parish legally for the first time in the 1800s.
The cast of Corpus Christi leaves through the house for their final exit, and as they poured out, I could see tears running down their cheeks, and they reached out and grabbed each other and stumbled toward their dressing rooms. The amount of emotional energy it must take to do that show every night is staggering. Brandon, aka Jesus, wept.
Then the audience came out, many also quite emotional, and I saw a familiar face or two from New York City...Juliet Mills and Maxwell Caulfield, a couple of fellow members of Mirror Rep whom I first knew 20-some years ago. (Am I dating myself?) And it turns out their daughter is in Corpus Christi, and they were there to see her. (And I was like: duh, Melissa Caulfield!)
I chatted with them for a moment and later at the Dragon, where they really had no memory of me (I was the just-thrown-out-of-acting school assistant and general dogsbody, and now it's a couple decades later and I'm a playwright in a festival in Dublin. Look at me in the middle of all this art, to paraphrase Frank O'Hara). I told them how much I'd enjoyed the Mirror production of Odets's Paradise Lost, which remains my touchstone for how I judge most of the plays I see. And how Geraldine Page was a mother to so many in the company (even the little assistants/especially the little assistants). And of course that's where I met Peter Bloch, who's directed at least five of my plays. There was something satisfyingly full-circle about it
And oh yeah, there was another play to go to! And at just past 10 o'clock, I sat down to my fourth show of the day, "Slipping," presented by The Side Project of Chicago. A teenager and his mother are in Iowa; having moved there from California. She's glad to be there, a professor at the university, he had to leave everything he knew behind, and his father is recently dead...we find out more about that later. There's a bit of Holden Caulfield in him (and you KNOW Holden would have dyed his hair green if he were around today). He meets a boy in Iowa, and tries not to fall back into obsessive, destructive habits. It was finely observed all the way round, and I noted there really is a Chicago style of acting, with its roots in people like Mamet and the Steppenwolfies. Good stuff. And in this play, the young guy actually grasps for hope & love at the end.
And off to the Dragon! There was a valedictory feel to the evening, because it was some people's last time to mix and mingle, and some who had stayed in during their runs could come out and play. The Dragon was packed with the usual Saturday night crowd as well as the festival folk.
I stayed out much later than usual as well; because this might be the last chance to talk to people, see them for awhile, exchange contact info, tell them they'd done good work and should be proud.
And now I'm going to see if my room is ready...I've been blogging this morning from the lobby of the Temple Bar Hotel...looking out on Temple Bar, watching as people check in and out, hearing all the languages being spoken, sitting on a comfortable couch and bone tired but happy.
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