Turbulence

 

Good People. Photo courtesy Bill Longshaw

As so it was. With the last performance of "Good People" at the Just Play open stage showcase on September 29th the curtain finally came down on the Grinder 2024 season. While it's not unheard of for me to pick up additional projects between Thanksgiving and the end of the year, at this point it would have to be something pretty special for me to take on another show in 2024. As any regular readers of this blog know, this has been an especially brutal year. 

Despite the challenges, I'm really happy with the theatre that we managed to make. I certainly hadn't planned to do any acting this year, but playing alongside Jules in Pride and Prejudice was definitely something special.

Our week 1 Ennotville show, "Benches and Couches" was a chance for me to try out a bunch of things that I've been needing to try out for a long time now, not the least of which was seeing if I could distill the essence of a show - Benches and Couches became the enigmatic "Couch Surfing" at the Guelph Fringe Festival a few weeks later, and I think we managed to accomplish the transition well, for the most part - not sure whether or not a "Time Traveling Couch" is any more believable than a "Time Traveling Bench," and I did miss the scene with the two pigeons and the squirrel, but I did like how the story arc that we had begun to discover in Ennotville was able to grow and refine into something more by the time we got to Guelph. 

Week 2 was a community effort, to be sure. I put out a call for people to help me put on a show, and the community answered. Thank-you to everyone who was involved in these shows - I'm so grateful to you all, and am so thrilled that I was able to meet a bunch of new people that I would never otherwise been able to work with. 

And the season did save the best for last. "Good People" was our contribution to the Grand River Arts Festivals' 10 Minute Play Competition, and while we didn't win any cash prizes (though Jules did pick up an adjudicator's award for her acting) it was a great day and a wonderful adventure in the land of Oz, complete with an actual tornado. Fun times. 

Photo Courtesy Grand River Arts Festival

Now all that's over, and seems so far away. Within hours of this photo being taken we were plunged back into chaos, and it hasn't really let up since, at least not until now, when I finally have found the time and head space to write a blog post, though my next play remains stubbornly out of reach. With any luck I'll get back to filling pages in my notebook over the Thanksgiving weekend, and once I start writing I usually find it hard to stop, but nonetheless the prospect of a long, bleak winter stretches out before me, my rehearsal hall too cold for everyone but the cats. 

So this is the time of year where I start to think seriously about what comes next. It's not simply a matter of saying "This is the play I want to do next." Nor do I find myself capable of sticking to any sort of multi-year curatorial plan - I tried to do that, but there are simply too many unknown factors, not the least of which is the fact that the ideas in my head keep leap-frogging over the glacial pace of my production reality. Instead of discovering the theatre that I want to do, this time of year is all about waiting for the theatre that I have to do to reveal itself to me. 

That's really what it is - waiting for the theatre I have to do to reveal itself to me. As much as I write most of the material I do, the choice to bring it to the stage is not an intellectual one, not based on any rational, logical reason, and when I try to pick a show that way, like I did with this past summer's attempted show, Maid of Stone, things fall apart. Perhaps there was a point in my creative career when the methodical, evidence-based approach worked for me. It still does work, for the most part, in my non-creative career, and perhaps it will be that way in my creative career in the future, but not today. Today my plays are born from turbulence. 

Stay tuned. I'll let you know when I know.