We started the day today with notes. Typically, this would involve the director giving us the notes from the preceding run – things that were good, things that didn’t work: a kind of tuning, tweaking session that would be adopted and put into the next run. Notes can sometimes be horrible experiences, with the director raging and insulting, and the cast cowering with guilt and shame.  I didn’t expect this notes session to be terrible; I thought yesterday’s run had gone fairly well, with some great new discoveries by everyone… but we didn’t get notes. Instead, we talked about those moments in the play that are fulcrums for our characters – actions that irrevocably change their world.

It was a very funny discussion. I’d meant to write down some of the pithier comments, because it’s a very smart cast (some of us being positively sesquipedalian), and the conversation moved from suicide to masturbation to the phallic construct of the first act to the fact that characters don’t “enter”, they “come”. There were observations about sexuality, and politics; the quality of love and the fact that we must evolve or die. We spoke about the enormous responsibility of the theatre itself – and that a bad film is merely a waste of two hours, but a bad play – or a bad production of a good play – is the breaking of a covenant. We resolved to be very good.

The more we work on this play, the more moving I find it. Act I is so dysfunctional – the characters are bound by societal expectation, the rule of convention and the fear of discovery. In Act II, we see that the old world has been laid bare – the centre of the patriarchal system cannot hold, and has broken. There is a kind of “queering” of the world: a recognition of unconventional love, and a diversity of family. This doesn’t make the world any easier to live in, but it makes it a somehow more valid place.

The trick is that not only does the style of writing change, from Act I to Act II, but so does the style of acting. Finding that balance is difficult, but will be rewarding. In the end, we have a character embracing her younger self, in an act of forgiveness, understanding and acceptance. Isn’t that something we’d all like to do?

I knew the play was fierce, with a kind of gritty, intentionally flat use of language that is mercilessly naturalistic with none of the embellishments of American naturalism – say the self-conscious cadences and cut-offs of Mamet, the lyricism of Tennesse Williams, the tragic earnestness of Arthur Miller. Then, just when I’ve decided the language is brutally spare, the play breaks into soliloquy. I look closer, and find the punctuation is…punctilious! The words are set as precisely as music, the punctuation an unerring clue to the pace and state of the speaker. I circle the “and’s” in my text. I circle the “very’s”. I count the number of lines until there’s finally a period and the stakes become clearer to me. I knew the play was funny when I heard us read it. Irreverent. Wicked. Packed with laughs of recognition and horror. And I’ve come to understand that the humour is both immanent in the situations, and deftly crafted in the lines themselves. I knew the play was the opposite of sentimental. Today I realized that it’s also terribly sad. I’ve gotten choked up at unexpected moments. Evan is the tallest and muscly-est person in the cast and he’s wearing high heels, and a gown with a corset (we’ve all made the inevitable jokes and continue to mine the endless possibilities for ridicule which will only deepen and get richer as we begin our backstage life together after opening) – he plays a woman whose ability to appear convincingly helpless is her bread and butter. When he/she stands on stage, alone, waiting, and watching, it’s heartbreaking.