Hampton, VA

We restaged Henry in three hours.

More precisely, we restaged every entrance and exit, every prop placement and costume change in three hours. The house, you see, was too small for our set. We all felt a little like understudies going on en masse in somebody else’s production. The theatre felt like it was once a movie theatre, a long railroad car of an audience on top of a postage-stamp stage.

Our second show in the space was actually a lot of fun. Still different enough to be live, but with fewer blank moments silently working out our next exits.

Unable to find good coffee on the road, and unwilling to make it myself, I’ve largely been off the sauce. So sitting around chatting with the chatty jewish CIA analyst-to-be barista in the coffee shop, drinking dynamite coffee, wound up a three hour venture. I didn’t see much of Hampton, VA.

The documentary lady, Sarah, is on board the bus with her camera. We’re watching Mad Men and trading Christopher Walkin impersonations. We have to move off the bus in two hours, in Hell’s Kitchen. Which has, undoubtedly, taken the place of a home in the last month. It has its own kind of stability.

Up next, New York, for three weeks in the same theatre Hunchback played in, on 42nd and Broadway. The glorious return.

Houghton, NY

People of Houghton, we have come to bring you Art.

Houghton is the kind of town that has a post office, know what I’m saying? Googlemaps’ll get you a real clear idea: restaurants? Subway and China Star. Coffee shop? Two towns over. 1700 people live in Houghton, and 700 of them came to see us.

We played the college church. Logistically difficult, but pure gold. The mural in the foyer spanned creation through the second coming (including charming scenes from the founding of Houghton College). Chosen people and the Miracle gospel. Bunch of white folks having a picnic in the woods with a lion after the second coming. No rapture. Big-B Belief theology, so radically different from my own church. The local crew was full of well-intentioned kids in Jesus Freak shirts, and the audience had some pretty clear opinions about things.

Immediately following the curtain speech a man said a prayer for us. Together we all spent a moment thanking the lord for the power of story, and the power of the actor. That everything that happened there might be pleasing to the lord. That they should be a responsive and friendly audience. Talk about luxury.

The show, predictably, was a big hit. Unplanned second curtain call.

So after the show we drove two towns away to the closest bar. Naturally.

Two of the three people inside worked there. Killer jukebox. We played shuffleboard with Tad (Ted? Todd? Unclear) and Joanne, drinking one dollar drafts and two dollar whiskeys. During shuffleboard mainly Joanne said her favorite word: shitfuck. Or Fuckshit. She was ambivalent. After shuffleboard, Joanne and I had a more verbose chat – in which, let the record state, nobody cried – but my little friendly questions accidentally pried open the lid on an angry and savagely disappointed heart. Joanne lived in Germany for four years and loved it. She only moved back to her goddamn hometown when her Army marriage broke. Two kids. Since, she got in with Tad. They used to live together, but now – well, when they see each other, they do, and when they don’t, they don’t.

They were tickled pink that we were headed from their town to Broadway. They opened up the greasetraps specially for us, bought us a round, and when we drove by this morning, the Marquee said “Thanks Acting Company for a Fun Night.”

Man. Pre-show prayers, half the town, shuffleboard, dollar drafts and broken hearts.

Up next, Hampton Va, Hometown of our own Dauphin. Til then, twelve solid hours on the bus.

Harrisburg, PA

Some spaces make you feel like you’re a better actor.

We played last night in a beautiful house, about 300 seats, far smaller than most of the barns we’ve done lately – still much larger than the house we built Henry for. The hospitable size and impeccable acoustics in the space put the show back in our hands.

Some thoughts on big houses and microphones.

In the circus, we go to see people in masterful defiance of death. In some sense, the theatre is a place where we can conquer the smallness, the incompleteness of our lives. The actor does and says all those things we imagine ourselves doing, but can’t quite get right. And she does them clearly, in vivid color, and above all – gracefully. When people ask (inevitably) at talkbacks “How do you remember all those lines?”, that isn’t all that they mean. What they are reaching for is an understanding of that grace. Sword swallowing and acting are not so different. Both give us a moment when the reconciled world is already here, at least at that time, and in that place.

We mike our actors now in big houses. Crutches. Often, we have to. By doing so, we deprive the audience of some of the grace that they came to see us master and wield. Of course, when we go sans support, but instead lose whole performances to monitoring our own volume and consonant intensity, we also do small service to the play.

By this reduction, see: Technique and Chops are not about the audience hearing words. They are about offering people two hours of human victory over smallness, clumsiness.

Discipline makes things easier – lets you throw the Big House switch and still be present. Touring these houses is the first time I see a reason I can really get behind and push on to make Skinner’s Eight points of Good Speech for the Classical Actor into habit.

Last night some delicious lagers at a local brewery, and a slumber party on the edge of a giggle til sleep.

We are somewhere in the Alleghenies. Next up, we play a church in Houghton, NY.