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What About The Weekend?

12/11/2010 — Megan

Here's a quick snapshot of what a weekend can look like:

* The beginning of auditions at Cutting Ball, where I'll be watching a total of over 220 monologues from San Francisco actors hoping to be part of our productions, workshops, and readings, which include, among other things: a bay area premiere from Will Eno, a rollicking comedy by Plautus, a documentary about one of the most rapidly changing areas in San Francisco, a parable of talking bugs (by the Capek brothers in 1920s Czechoslovakia), and a trip-hop musical.

* Watching auditions for the Bay One Acts Festival, so that I can have top-secret hobnobbery about casting choices with Jessica Holt, who is Artistic Director of the festival, and is directing my piece for them in March. (The play is "A Three Little Dumplings Adventure," the first thing I ever wrote for the stage, from my sophomore year of college. It was subsequently produced in NYC, but I hadn't sent it anywhere or touched it in years, until I suddenly sat up in bed one morning this Summer and attacked the script, buffing, polishing, and fixing it. It felt great to do that, but also weird, like sneaking into your parents' attic and airbrushing your baby pictures.)

* The first writers' meeting for the San Francisco Olympians Festival, where a palpitation-inducing group of 29 writers (plus me) will each be sharing the first 3 pages of our plays, to be produced in a devastating tornado of staged readings in October. Each play is based on a "heavenly body," like a star, a planet, a constellation. My constellation is Orion, the hunter with the belt of three stars. I'm writing him as a 1970s cop, like Dirty Harry, stalking his prey though the city streets. Orion, aside from the Big Dipper, is the only constellation I can ever find. I go for walks now and look up at him in the dark, and wonder how I'm going to get this play (which came to me in a blurry slideshow of images-- flared pants turning a corner in the light of a streetlamp, a cup of bad coffee set down hopelessly on a desk after a rough night, an older woman in an office telling a younger woman their conversation is over-- a man with a script in his hand talking about it all) out of the sky and out of my head.

* Thank goodness some weekends are like this. Thank goodness every weekend is not like this.