I Love What I Do.

One thing we found out is that my new musical is four hours long. Oops. I had in my head that it would be under 2 hours because of the 1 page = 1 minute rule — my current draft is 89 pages — but I guess that doesn’t apply to musicals or to shows where one character tells lots of long, single-spaced stories.

We had to be out of the room by 10, so we didn’t quite finish reading it, but we got very close, and even though I was disappointed not to hear the ending, I count it a huge success. My brain is chattering away at me with all kinds of big and small ideas for the next draft. The main thing of course is to cut half of it. Some of those cuts will be chainsaw blunt, but most of it will be more like laser surgery.

It was a thrill to hear it out loud, to find out that it is mostly “actable.” That the convoluted mix of worlds and times and places I’ve created is — or at least is going to be — legible. And that it’s interesting, even compelling, to people other than me — if I can judge by having kept 8 actors engaged and energized through 3-1/2 hours of a dense, complex, and sometimes kind of heavy play. I’m always saying it, because it needs to be said, that actors are amazing. I spend my life and career in awe of what they do. That moment when a thing on a page becomes a thing in a room thrills me every single time. Theater is literally magic.

Today is my 10th wedding anniversary. Chan and I are going to Mohonk Mountain House (where we got married) for the weekend to celebrate, but today I’m going to do as close to nothing as I can manage. Monday I’ll dive back in. People always say that re-writing is harder than writing, but that’s not how I ever experience it. They’re both hard, just hard in different ways. I can’t wait.

First table reading of JACK, LaMama rehearsal space on Great Jones Street.