A Fresh Perspective

I guess I'm just not used to going to bed early. I've been up for a while, working on my reflection; it's coming along, but it's proving to be more of a challenge than I expected.

Something silly I've been doing lately, and which I've gotten my castmembers hooked on doing, is to look up clips from other performances of "The Dining Room" online. I did it once before auditions, forever ago, but I didn't watch much. I'm glad I never found the ones I've found now, because I think since we were all coming to it with little to no knowledge of the play we were more able to make it our own, and to let ourselves be creative while not being influenced by someone else's interpretation.

It used to bother me that people would have flat reactions to me when I'd say I was in "The Dining Room", but the more I think about it, the more I'm glad that probably 99% of our audience had no idea what to expect. Granted, the lack of familiarity partly manifested in smaller audiences, but again, I'd rather have a small audience with zero preconceptions than a large one with their own boxes to break. That seems to be the challenge of much of modern Shakespeare, or for the play last fall, "Peter Pan"; trying to do something that's been done many times before in a way that's fresh and that gets the audience to think about it in a new way is it's own challenge.

"The Dining Room" has shown me many new ways to think about theatre, as an art form, and as an experience of growth and of human creativity, and so I hope that those who came to see it benefited from its newness as well.