One Thought In A Million: Opening Weekend

I can't believe the first weekend of "The Dining Room" performances is over! Overall, opening weekend was spectacular.

Opening night: so much energy! I could hardly focus on the last bit of homework I had to do before heading down to Mayers Auditorium to get ready for the special outdoor show in the library courtyard. I popped into my friends' Bible study (that I'm usually a part of, but not last Thursday!) and they all prayed over me and for the show. When I walked into Mayers a short while later, the first thing Megan and I did when we saw each other was start screaming with excitement.

Most of the call time was taken up by transporting props, sets and other set-up stuff from the auditorium to the courtyard, and then setting everything up once it got there. Things were going smoothly, and the excitement was building. About half an hour before the audience was to begin milling in, we gathered to run through a couple of scenes, just to make sure we knew how to work with our considerably smaller stage. Backstage (that is, behind a black curtain on the side of the stage) I looked across the way at Jonny. He made a ninja pose, and I moved to do the same; not paying attention, I moved my foot and knocked over one of the prop wine glasses, snapping the head clean from the stem.

For a few minutes, people slightly freaked out, and I felt absolutely horrible. James, the stage manager, was wonderful about it, though; after we had sorted everything out he came to ask if I was OK, and to assure me that these things happen, and that everyone was more upset that the glass had broken than that I had broken it. I admitted that I had been messing around, but he was unphased. "It's not your fault that you weren't thinking about where you moved your foot," he said. It's interesting that I remember so much about this one little bad thing that happened on an otherwise great, great night; it really resonates with me how gracious everyone was in spite of my carelessness. I am increasingly thankful for the people I have been fortunate enough to work with in this play; everyone is not only extremely talented and hard-working, but loving, and genuine, and in this case, calm and bracing.

The rest of the night went off without a hitch. Someone said it was the former director's motto that there always has to be a minor crisis before the show, so maybe the broken wine glass was our bit of good luck. Every scene felt the best it had so far, and the audience was great. It wasn't a huge crowd, which was good, because if the courtyard was full not everyone would have been able to hear or see us. They laughed a lot, and it made me realize how funny this play actually is, in spite of the serious elements that accompany almost every scene. It's certainly not a comedy, but almost every scene in Act I got laughs. I think I like the humor almost better than a comedy, because it's juxtaposed with solemnity, and intermixed within the problems and happenings of the characters' lives. Life is not a comedy, but life has funny moments, and I think that's sort of how "The Dining Room" is funny. Things are certainly funnier when you're not trying to be funny, but when they just happen, and that's how humor comes out in the play: the characters are just being themselves, which happens to be quirky and funny sometimes.

Nick and I have several scenes together, one of which we refer to simply as "Jim and Meg". It's a scene between an older father and his thirty-ish daughter, and overall it's very complex and sad. There is a lot of tension between our characters; the scene finds the daughter confessing all of her problems to her father, and then practically begging him to let her come home and try to start over. From the beginning we've both been challenged by it, but after Thursday night we both agreed that it had felt like our best performance yet.

I could write on and on about Jim and Meg; I've spent a lot of time thinking about that scene, and it's really come to feel like the climax of the show for me. It is my last significant scene, but it's by far been my most challenging. I want Meg to seem genuine, but not overdone or simply shocking in her (somewhat shocking) confessions. I really empathize with her feelings of confusion and failure and hopelessness, and I think everyone can. At the same time, Jim cannot be pegged as the "bad guy", the cold, distant father. He is more complex than that; I think a large part of the tension between the two is that he, for a good part of the scene, simply can't understand that his daughter's life is as messy as it sounds. He keeps pushing simple solutions on her, but it takes a while for him to see that hers are not simple problems, or simple feelings.

Life is not simple, or as simple as it used to be. That idea, I think, can be applied more broadly to the entire play. "These are different times", is how one character puts it. Humans are always changing, moving forward; that's life. And sometimes we can't start over, but we can always move forward, in the best way that we can.