September 5 - Day 0: I Leave in Eight Hours, So Why Am I Writing This Rather Than Sleeping?

You don’t know me without you have read a blog called 47 Days, but that ain’t no matter.
 
(My wife informs me that I should make it clear that I’ve just parodied the opening of Huckleberry Finn. “No one will get that,” she claimed. “No one will be reading it,” I responded.)


Longtime readers of that blog and my other endeavor (A Hearty Handclasp) will remember my journal of my experiences living in New York while I was acting in Sam and Dede, or My Dinner with Andre the Giant. Now that I’m going back again with Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, I’m going to try it again, only this time going into even more tedious detail. (The reason for that being that, in going back over the other blog to search for the name of a restaurant or business I’d visited and wanted to remember, I inevitably found that I had neglected to include the very information I was looking for.)


The more observant of you may have noticed above that I included the name Kurt Vonnegut with the title of play. There are two reasons for that. The first, and probably more obvious, is name recognition. Even in our society where people are reading less and less (especially my business students …), Vonnegut’s name still provides some recognition among even casual readers. (Seems like high school students are still assigned Slaughterhouse Five—rightfully) The second is that, when I’d mention the title of the play without Vonnegut’s name attached, people invariably though I meant Night, Mother by Marsha Norman. (And now that I think about it, the endings of both plays are not dissimilar, but I won’t give too much away.)

Our logo. Isn't it swell?

I’ve been preparing for this trip for nearly a year (it actually seems longer), arranging for an Airbnb in the East Village (where I stayed last time, coming to really love the area. I hope it hasn’t changed too much) and buying my airline ticket pretty much as soon as I could. I would say I have mixed emotions about going again, but it feels far more complicated than that. While there’s a level of comfort in returning to a very nice theatre (59E59) with an incredibly nice staff in a play I’ve already done, there’s a lot of trepidation in knowing that, not only will I be working with an entirely new cast (who seem to have impeccable and impressive credentials), but the physical production will be markedly different. On top of that, I wasn’t sure when rehearsals would be starting, so I actually have nearly two weeks in New York to prepare before we start (on the 18^th). Not that I don’t mind having time to explore and walk my feet off in my favorite city (even if my days are filling up before I even leave), but I’ve been to New York so many times that the touristy things no longer hold much attraction.


And none of this deals with what promises to be hot and humid weather. As I write this, it is 1:03 am in the East Village, and the temperature is 77 degrees with 81% humidity. (I do not do well under such conditions.) It seems like it’s going to break soon, but even when I get in, it’s going to be in the 70s with a decent chance of rain. (It’s supposed to “cool off” later in the week, but even that is relative, as it’s currently a pleasant 57 in Pacifica.)


The most jarring thing of all with that it’ll be more than a month before I see my wife Pidge again. For me, it’s bad enough to be away from so many of my accustomed comforts, but to combine that with not seeing her adds a lot to my usual anxiety about traveling. Not that I’m a bad flyer; I just get all angsty before any big trip—especially one like this with a lot artistically riding on it. And it’s not like we won’t talk or FaceTime every day; it’s just not being here with her.


All in all, I expect to have a great time: living in the city, seeing friends and plays, eating great food, working on the show, and all the rest—and if it’s anything like last time, it’ll go by in the blink of an eye. Yes, I’ll be there for two months, but I know it’ll be over in what seems like ten minutes. It’s more that I’m never been a big fan of the unknown, and this is more “unknown” than most things I’ve done.


I expect that the play will go over very well. It was very well received when we did it in San Francisco, and its theme of (as I see it) “how far can good people go in collaborating with (or at least, not stopping) evil” is more timely than ever—especially this week. One never knows, though; the theatre, like all art forms, is a crapshoot; you put out the work in the best way you can, but you can’t have any idea how any audience (and they’re all different) will accept or receive it.

As much as I hate to sound like a promo (but this is indeed a promo, if nothing else), but I hope you’ll join me on this journey. I’ll be as honest and funny as I can be. I’ll admit that, like last time, this will serve mainly as a platform for me to write down impressions, memories, and opinions to remind myself of what it was like for me to be on the trip, but I’ll strive to make it as entertaining and informative as I can. The thing that will probably be most interesting to me is how those memories will change. I went to Russia in 1993, and have very clear memories of things that happened. When I go back and look at my journal of that trip, though, things were actually the exact opposite of, or very different from, how I wrote about them as they were happening. 

We’ll just see what happens this time.