Now I lay me down to show prep, may my course be blessed by Hermes Threewizards. The future is unclear and storms unpredictable, but still I can put extra caulk between the boards of my hull and lay in as many oranges and packs of Buldak as this craft will allow. Preparing to direct a play is basically just an emotional exercise as nothing you plan will survive the first encounter with the enemy — the enemy is basically every component of the thing. Cast, crew, set, costumes, illness, cowardice, caprice, and Capri Sun.

To catch you up: I am directing a production of Antigone (Jean Anouillh/ translated by Lewis Galantiere) this summer. Auditions are in June, show opens in August. This is my 14th time in the director’s chair with this company, stretched over a couple of decades. I’m a goddamn warhorse at this point. The days of directing out of social pressure, vague artistic yearning, or purely atavistic conviction are behind me. Basically I only direct these days when I’m legitimately excited about a project and have every intention to get real weird with it. Or, more to the point, I work on projects when the ceaseless alarm clock in my mind sounds that I haven’t done something sufficiently cool to justify this entire plasma-type personality matrix I’ve been rocking.

I was chatting with some other theater people recently and I dropped some questionably sage wisdoms over pancakes. Maturity is just accepting what truly motivates you – boiling away all of the vague trappings of success, art, and progress. For me, everything I do ties back to wanting cute girls to think I’m funny. That’s the real engine all this creative activity has been running on – moments of beauty and truth are completely unplanned and are more by-product than goal. Wild to think the lengths I have gone to make things of ever-increasing difficulty and complexity using nothing more than a 12 year old’s survival strategy – the forge of all that I have made is nothing more than a hastily assembled Easy Bake Oven with racing flames painted on the side.

And this show appeared early in that juvenile charlatan’s development. My high school performed this script, way way back in the late 90’s. (WAY BACK) What artistic style or proclivities I have in theater can almost be traced 1:1 back to this production specifically – and generally everything my high school drama teacher laid down as first principles in my peapod brain. He was getting his MFA in Theatrical Direction, so our high school productions were purposefully academic – I was exposed to Bertolt Brecht far too early to every truly recover. By it’s very nature high school theater – and community theater(!) – are art forms of limitation — usually financial. Leaning into the more imaginative and primal language of the stage has an immediate advantage when you can’t afford much more than a couple of flats and some chairs. But, don’t worry, I learned absolutely the wrong lesson as usual. A chair on an empty stage is IT, girl. A voice, two voices, three voices. The darkness. The light. The space that can be anything, can be everything, can be nothing. My artistic colleagues roll their eyes at my sets made of boxes and benches and empty air, much as I sneer at the door that needs a doorknob on BOTH SIDES.

I’ve also had the rare opportunity to have a trial run at directing this before. A few years ago I stumbled upon a copy of the script in a used bookstore and felt compelled (enticed by fate?) to put together a staged reading. I’ve been thinking about this show for years before, and the more I think about it (and the reading confirmed) – is that it doesn’t need any help. It doesn’t need to be set in Aghanistan or even Paris during the occupation. It’s always now. Every time I come back, it’s more topical – more to the point. Maybe just the years of watching fascism rise here, inarguable – impossible to not recognize – have made the script hit harder and harder. It doesn’t ask the audience to imagine a world without fascism — that is a pure impossibility. It’s asking how will you choose to live with it. Or perhaps die under it.

This is a play about sound, about voices. The little human moments before the machinery of it pull the god in Antigone to the fore. And then the goddamn bars when Creon and she argue. What a strange thing to recognize as familiar, the curse in the blood, the glorious idiocy of revolt.

I know more now, I have more tricks up my sleeve. This time I’ll catch it, this time it won’t get away from me. Maybe.

A chorus is a weapon built to assault heaven. Human energy brought together, bound by time, focused and sharp. Let’s point a gun at god and demand that they dance.