A Listening Exercise

I work in theater in my everyday life (I don't know what "everyday life" means there. Seems like everything, including kink, including writing, including the blogo/redditsphere, should count at my everyday life. But anyway). Right now, I'm working as an Assistant Stage Manager at a festival, held at my during-the-year workplace, of new plays. There are six plays; I'm working on two of them. Without going into detail (because I'm not allowed to), one of mine is about a young girl, a one-woman show exploring drug addiction in parenthood and childhood abuse and identity. It's interesting and well-written. I'm enjoying it.

And the other? The other is written by a young woman, fresh out of her MFA program at Yale (basically: what I want to be). It deals with gender. It deals with abuse. It deals with feminism and misogyny and consent, and a little bit, kink overtones It's brilliant and funny and chock full of delicious thematic ambiguities.

Because it's a new play workshop, we've spent the first few days sitting around, talking about the play. The actors are smart, the director is smart, the dramaturg is smart. The writer is really smart. They offer insight and analyses. And what do I do? I sit. I take notes. I, as a part of the Stage Management team, remain silent and nuetral. I refill the water pitchers.

Reading back, that sounds bitter. It's not meant to be. It's my job, and I'm doing it how I always do it (it's pretty essential for Stage Managers to be neutral; reasons for which are many and, at this point, boring to explain). It's just never, ever been so hard before. I am just exploding with things to say about this play, this play that's so far up my alley that it's made friends with the stray cats and the garbage cans, this play that has become my alley. And to my job well, I can't say any of them.

Instead, I've resorted to alternately scribbling down furious notes on my yellow legal pad to write about later, and distracting myself with the internet because I just can't take it anymore.

One day, I'll be in the writers seat. Or here's hoping, anyway. For now, I've got one well-scribbled legal pad.