8.30.02 – now you see it, now you don’t

Twelfth Night closed last night. from my seat in the stage manager’s booth i can see over the set to the desert hills beyond the theatre. at dusk most nights i can see deer – sometimes a dozen or more, with half-grown fawns – frolic in the little dry glen behind the dressing rooms (in this picture, it’s just over the top of the blue backdrop).

while watching the final performance of any show, i always have a moment where i stop and catch my breath and wonder at the temporal existence of this art form. thinking, right now, at this moment, this work of art exists, but it has no physical body – it exists thru the bodies and voices and thoughts and emotions of actor and playwright and designer and director and audience member, and later tonight, it will no longer exist except as something that each of us experienced, took part in, created, were a part of for a couple of months, maybe only a couple of hours.

perhaps an obvious conclusion, but i always marvel at it just a bit. what was twelfth night is now bits of broken up blue plywood in sticking out of the dumpster, it’s lighting instruments neatly stacked and gels filed away in folders sorted by color, it’s satin doublets and feathery wedding dresses that, out of context, have no significance. it’s like a body when the life has gone out of it – it’s still made up of cells and blood and bone, but without life its an empty shell. twelfth night now exist only in my memory. but i experienced it. i was there. i was in that moment. and everyone of the thousands of people that saw or helped create this show, they carry that moment in them, too.