Breakthroughs.

Apparently there’s a leak in the plumbing under our bathroom. It’s not affecting us but is, understandably, a problem for the people in the apartment below. Plumbers are here breaking a hole through the tile and the floor under our toilet this morning. I don’t know what the machine is that they’re using to do it, but it’s loud, and it’s going to take about three hours the guy tells me. High-rise problems.

All week I’ve been endeavoring to revise my unintentionally 4-hour long musical To make it shorter, but also better. I say “endeavoring to” because sometimes I’m actually revising, as in moving text around on a page, but more often I’m just sitting here thinking and frowning. I’m sure I’m not the first person to say that rewriting is like playing Jenga, but it’s really only like the part of Jenga where everything is falling in a pile on the table and you’re saying “fuck me.”

I started out thinking I could just go through everything and shorten it. I’m good at that. It’s not easy but it’s a specific kind of technical task that I know how to do. But pretty quickly I realized that wasn’t going to do it. I needed a plan, a method for wrangling all the disparate elements of my story. A theatrical idea that would, 1, make the piece more theatrical, 2, make it obvious to me what should stay and what should go, 3, clarify my point of view, and 4, make the piece more present, more urgent.

I’m not sure what words to use to describe how this process feels: sometimes it’s like a grinding anxiety, sometimes something approaching a panic attack, it’s a lot of telling myself to just breathe, and then there are moments when I feel like I am the smartest person and the greatest artist in the world. I was annoyed thinking I would lose a morning’s work because of the noise and the plumbers, but somehow that background distraction, and the fact that I need to pee and have to hold it for another two hours, has worked to dislodge the gunk in my brain and revealed an obvious solution. Hooray!

Now I just have to actually do it.