BACK
By Yvette Nolan
A Soldier's Tale opened last night at the Fleck. This morning after I sent notes to Michael. The creation of work is a process, and a late part of the process is the insertion of the audience into the equation. Because of the vicissitudes of space (which I know I go on and on about), we do not have the luxury of audience until we open. The audience gives us new eyes, new ears. We see afresh. Colleagues last night were very generous in their response to the show, in both their praise and their critique. I also think that the days of tech in the theatre are about process. We are making adjustments the whole time (often to the chagrin of the house crew who seem to feel we should be inserting a completed product into the space) because we have all kinds of new information. Everything is connected, everything is always connected, and when we change this staging to accommodate, say, the awkward lack of wing space, it reverberates in odd ways through the entire piece. Some things that worked in the studio need to be much bigger, or smaller, in this space. So we adjust. I love working to the last moment, to the moment when the house manager opens the house and lets the audience in to our process. And then, after the painful half hour where no work can be done, I am immersed in a new and refreshing process, the one that includes these hundreds of eyes and ears and hearts.
Photograph by David Hou.