I just got in from the staged workshop reading of a new play by an emerging playwright, at Moving Arts. It was incredibly rewarding to be in a space that a handful of us turned into a theatre in 1992 and to marvel that there it is, 24 years later, still open and operating and doing new work and doing a really, really good job with that new work. Many of the faces have changed, of course (including mine, when you think about it), but the spirit of doing adventurous new work and doing your best to make it good — that has stayed.

The playwright, who is a genuine talent and someone I’ve known for probably eight years now, said during the intermission that she’d been concerned during act one that the actors were holding back too much, so she’d just come outside from having “unleashed” them. That proved true. Because near the end of the play, the actor playing Apollo moved into a frenzy and threw himself against a back wall — a back wall that, as I knew, was actually a thin painted piece of wooden shielding hiding our electrical panels. Which promptly cracked in half, prompting laughs from the audience, as the play continued, broken skewed wall panel and all. When the play was finished, he came over sheepishly to greet me and two of his friends and I said, “Well, 24 years later, that was something new.”

But there was a lot that was new: the play, most of the talent involved,  most of the audience, and more. One thing that’s never gotten old:  doing what’s new.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 20th, 2016 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Theatre, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.