Wow. First I started writing at midnight after dress/tech last night and now I’m sitting in tech on Wednesday 11/28 on a quick break as we finesse sound. Everyone is working their asses off. One more dress rehearsal, then previews. This is when it all comes together, which reveals all the strengths and all the holes yet to fill, to find, to love??? Prioritizing notes, deciding what is a note, what requires work on our feet. And also the absence of the audience and the impending presence of the audience. We try to solve so much in rehearsals, to know what a show is, when the truth is that once the audience comes in there is such a shift in energy. All that happens on stage is witnessed and witnessed for the FIRST time, very different than the same crew of people watching over and over again.

And you know what? It matters, it really freakin’ matters. Actors find the tension in being watched doing what they’re doing. Actors find their timing. Actors find a different (and usually higher) stake in communicating because – oh my god – there are people who need to hear this story. Which is not to say we sit back at this time and think the audience will solve the problems – but it’s about a balance between working tirelessly with all the resources you have in the room and still knowing, remembering, the power of the whole reason for doing it: who you’re telling – giving – the story to.

I work with liveness. That’s what I do. That’s what I do to an extreme with my company 500 Clown, meaning we don’t take liveness for granted as a given in theater, but rather forge it in each performance. How does the audience’s energy, reactions, utterances change the performance night to night? In 2000, when we first made Hunchback, I had different concerns. In the last seven years, I have developed enormously as a theater-maker and director – have found my voice, my vision, my curiosity, my interest. I came into directing this “remount” interested in how liveness, spontaneity and humanness interact with puppetry and mask and sound score. It was an actual question. How can this question, this inquiry, serve this story? That’s where my head was at around midnight last night. Went to bed, woke up at 3:15 am still in conversation with myself about the show, stayed up ‘til 6:30 am organizing my notes, slept another hour. Now back in the theater, happy to be in the doing rather than the thinking. By the by, note to self – always good to remember – don’t try to make decisions or know too much in the middle of the night when emotions and reason muddle into a mish mash of chaos and passion.

Ciao.

Leslie Buxbaum Danzig, Hunchback Director