New Day #292

First rehearsal of my first professional play. We laughed. We cried. We did Jazz Hands.
A dream come true.

New Day #279

It's just two weeks until rehearsals begin for HOLIDAZED, my first professional play, so I suppose that's why I woke up this morning having had my first-ever Playwright's Nightmare.

Having been a performer, I'm well familiar with having an Actor's Nightmare, that nocturnal disaster in which you find yourself onstage in a play you've never heard of. Back when I was an opera singer, I once woke up to discover I'd stripped off all of the bedding while I was asleep and had thrown it across the room.

But the Playwright's Nightmare was a New Thing for me. In this one, I was at the first reading and I opened up the script only to discover a scene I had never seen before, a monotonous shapeless thing which went on endlessly. WITHOUT ANY LAUGHS. Truly my worst nightmare. What's more, two of the children aged 8 and 10 were being played by actors in their twenties. When I confronted the director about it, he was offended that I questioned his casting choices and banned me from rehearsals.

I woke up drenched in sweat.