Friday Foibles
Well I wasn't going to get a chance to post today, but here I am - a little late but on the web and ready to post!
I wasn't sure what I was going to write about, but I think that the topic of choice today will be family. The theatre family, that is.
For those of you who have been involved with Grinder over the past little while, you'll know that the company has undergone some monumental changes in the past 12 months. Some have been good (a few even wonderful) and some have been bad (a few even disastrous), but all have come about because the bonds that are formed when you do a play create a unit that mimic, in almost every way, the dynamics of a family unit. And as you know, there are strong, stable, thriving families, and there are dysfunctional families, and there are families that rest somewhere in between. So too with doing a play - some shows have been so special that I would happily do them all over again just to work with the same people. Others I wake up at night in a cold sweat over, even years after I have put them behind me.
I used to hope and pray after every bad show that it would be my last, and that I would learn from my mistakes and ensure that such a disaster would never happen again. And it is true, I have learned a few lessons over the years, and as a result I don't have disastrous shows for the same reasons quite as often as I used to. But I have learned that there will always disastrous experiences, even when you do everything possible to prepare for them, even under circumstances that you would never in a million years expect to be problematic. So the challenge, it seems, is not to avoid bad shows, but to learn to deal effectively with them when they arise, and create conditions under which a bad show does not lead to greater troubles for the survival of the company at large.
Friday's foibles. Who knew?
I wasn't sure what I was going to write about, but I think that the topic of choice today will be family. The theatre family, that is.
For those of you who have been involved with Grinder over the past little while, you'll know that the company has undergone some monumental changes in the past 12 months. Some have been good (a few even wonderful) and some have been bad (a few even disastrous), but all have come about because the bonds that are formed when you do a play create a unit that mimic, in almost every way, the dynamics of a family unit. And as you know, there are strong, stable, thriving families, and there are dysfunctional families, and there are families that rest somewhere in between. So too with doing a play - some shows have been so special that I would happily do them all over again just to work with the same people. Others I wake up at night in a cold sweat over, even years after I have put them behind me.
I used to hope and pray after every bad show that it would be my last, and that I would learn from my mistakes and ensure that such a disaster would never happen again. And it is true, I have learned a few lessons over the years, and as a result I don't have disastrous shows for the same reasons quite as often as I used to. But I have learned that there will always disastrous experiences, even when you do everything possible to prepare for them, even under circumstances that you would never in a million years expect to be problematic. So the challenge, it seems, is not to avoid bad shows, but to learn to deal effectively with them when they arise, and create conditions under which a bad show does not lead to greater troubles for the survival of the company at large.
Friday's foibles. Who knew?
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