As I write this director’s note, I am covered in many different colors of paint. Our rehearsal process here at Herricks accelerates rapidly in the last two weeks of production, with the set, sound, costumes, props and lighting all coming together right before our audience finds their seats. By Monday, however, we will have our student crew armed with crowbars gleefully tearing our just-finished set to pieces. Months of hard work rehearsing, staging, memorizing, building, and (so much) painting– all of it just goes “poof” by the end of the run.
Absent context, this is crazy. Even crazier is that I’ve done this dozens of times over the last seventeen years as a director. My first play that I ever directed was Hamlet, also by William Shakespeare, because I figured “why not start with something easy?” My colleagues and I had a wonderful time making plays with Acorn, my theater company, named after a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We put on mostly terrible productions and incinerated money at an alarming rate. Actually, we turned a profit of $200 on Hamlet. We used it to buy snacks and drinks for the cast party.
I say all this as a testament to how impossible it is to escape the pull of theater. We put in hours of effort for a single weekend. We tear down what we build almost immediately. We get maybe a few good performances before we close. And we still keep doing it. The horrendous company of actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream put on their play at the end of the show despite bizarre odds: their lead actor is turned into a donkey. But even that does not deter them! Perhaps their commitment to theater is much like my own.
I like to think of myself as Hamlet backstage, speaking to the players, advising them to “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you: trippingly on the tongue.” But as I direct yet another wonderful and brief theater production, perhaps I am Nick Bottom. Because as he says in our show, “Man is but an ass…”
-Rob Gioia, Director
