Voice compares A New Theory of Vision to Tom Stoppard & William Gibson...

In an interesting turn of events, Garret Eisler from the Voice compares tags A New Theory of Vision as "Stoppardian Banter meets William Gibson mindfuck." It's a great tag and rather flattering... of course not one we can post on our site as is (hence we use most-discreet asterisks). Stoppard is a heroic playwright and Gibson a great genius as well. Wow.

So come see this play! It's like spending an afternoon at the West End Theatre in Cyberspace...

the critics... new philosophy... hope...

We got widely varied critical response to A NEW THEORY OF VISION; the first critic gave us an unabashed rave and said, there's all this philosophical background in the play, perhaps a bit too much, but since it does reflect on the action, you have to sort of let it wash over you and then it all makes sense, even if you're not a philogeek. Another, our only pan, said, there's all this character and plot stuff but not enough of the actual philosophy these guys are talking about. Finally, there was a balanced review that complained s/he wanted to hear the philosophy too. So that's two critics who complained they wanted to have the philosophical content of Lee's books spelt out.

Well, I'm not adding these explicitly to the play. It feels talky enough in the parts where it talks about the de minima aspects of Berkeley's philosophy that directly impact the play (a total of 2 minutes of stage time, max, and even though these support the action moment to moment, some might feel even these to be part of an extra credit assignment).

So perhaps we need to prepare a companion to the play that explicates the exact philosophies about which Lee wrote in his two books? Now, it must be said the philosophy is actually at the heart of the play's action. Thus if you observe the play's action, you can deduce all the philosophy you need, right there in front of you. This is perhaps an arrogant statement. Because if the smart people who write our theatre criticism can't pick this stuff up from the action of the play, how can we simpler minded people?

(There's an implicit criticism of criticism building here, I can feel it... but I won't spoil the ending of this essay by stating it there, so let's briefly state it here. Critics often take upon themselves the "duty" to "represent" the audience, but they often use a simplified model of who the audience is, and judge a work by how "clear" it is to that simple-minded artificial audience model. But it's self-deception. Audiences are far smarter than critics think they are, and sometimes, far smarter than the critics themselves.)

So. A warning. If you proceed there will be spoilers. And thanks for sticking with this, thus far.

Lee's first book, A New Theory of Vision was essentially a simplification and popularization of the works of Berkeley and the idealists, updated for a more telepresent world such as existed in the late 1980s, when his book would have come out. The parts of the materialist/idealist philosophy that would have made the most stir in the popular mind - the book was, after all, a massive best-seller - would have been those that talked about the increasing virtualization of who we were. Extended we were, as McLuhan would have said, by our creations - the telephone, television, and the PC network - we learned to project and virtualize our identities to match their representations over the various wire protocols of these extensions.

So we would have first developed a "voice or sound-heavy" set of identity contexts to serve as representations of ourselves over the telephone (which is a two-way medium - one-to-one) and for radio (which is a broadcast medium - one to many); a visual-and-sound set of identity contexts to represent us over the airwaves. These would eventually evolve to no longer being literal attempts to represent us. They would begin that way. But identity as communicated and compressed over these media would become first shadow representations of our selves, then gradually the representations would diverge as we accommodated ourselves to the medium, until eventually we had created at least one, perhaps many separate representations of ourselves to adapt to each medium.

Shadow identities, each containing part of our own experience and the contexts made real and appropriate for each medium and tuned to the audience each medium brought. So to each person with whom you conversed on the telephone, you created a different identity. It began as a set of sounds that resembled your voice, but gradually it evolved to become a new voice. Likewise, on TV or the radio, you created new visual and audio aspects of yourself.

Note in the play how the characters identities are somewhat malleable. Not in a MAN = MAN way (cf. Brecht) but rather in a postmodern way - their decisions and actions and the "selves" we see of them are adapted to the medium in which they present these selves. These represent the world as Lee saw it in his best-selling book.

Lee's new book, also probably destined to be a best-seller, The Book of Reality, takes this much further, in fact all the way into the world Erich inhabits. On the path to writing the book based on Erich's online world, Lee is in fact creating signifiers that led him inexorably to the realizations he has at the end of the original act-break, where his mind begins to loop in on itself - when both he and we - SEE and HEAR his self-perceived crime, that he didn't prevent a suicidal person, whom he loved very much, from committing suicide. The realization he makes - and which is wrong - is that the self is actually an illusion. That there is no contiguous set of ideas upon which any person is based. That we are chaotic stews of ideas constantly attempting to summarize and interpret and re-spew endless chaotic casseroles of matter and energy that surround us, and of which we are also constructed.

This can lead to a depairing, nihilist worldview which in fact represents exactly Jane's. We would then all want to kill ourselves, since what's the point of existence if you're a temporary process that observes temporary processes, and even your observations themselves are captured in a boiling cauldron of sense information which in itself is destined to change and be corrupted by chaos?

But the other assertion The Book of Reality makes is there are constancies. That the only constants are the links between us. Two hands clasping each other. Words of comfort, and care. We are the forces, amidst the stew and spew, that wrenches the world back from chaos. We create the illusion of order, and it is in fact the illusion of order that is the fact of order. In a world where all is illusion, illusion is therefore fact. That it all is some sort of miracle worth experiencing is the main of it.

We're a *PICK* in BACK STAGE!

"thought-provoking...  

"a stunning Matt Steiner...

"smart video set by production designer George Allison...

"Director Cat Parker culls vibrant characterizations...

"skillfull character development by Ferrante...

"unexpectedly effective... !

Have a look at the article:

http://www.backstage.com/bso/news_reviews/nyc/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003953831

Don't miss this show... if you sit on the fence too long you'll miss out on tickets. We cannot extend this run.

So... PLEASE buy tickets from.

http://www.sanctuarytheatre.org

See you at the show... 

love

25 Random Things about A New Theory of Vision

 25 Random Things about A New Theory of Vision (Sanctuary: Manifesto)

1. What is the sound of memory? How does imagination smell? What flashing color best represents ideas as they form? What can grow in the fertile loam of the mind? Can the manifestations of the senses themselves be defined by sensory input? Does a picture summarize vision? 
2. It is not possible to have fun in the theatre. Seats are too uncomfortable. Acting too mannered. Sets are too shoddy; lights too bright. Darkness too pervasive; humor too droll; tragedy too lachrymose. It is not possible to have fun in the theatre. But it's possible to have a blast.
3. First Confession: The germ of the idea for the play A NEW THEORY OF VISION originated in a story I wrote at 19, while living in Exeter, England. There really was a girl named Jane, however she didn't kill jump off a bridge. Instead, she was sort of indifferent as people sometimes are, and probably completely without real volition happened to break my heart. SO at the time, I believe I just wanted her to jump off a bridge, and had her do it in the story. Amazing how vindictive we writers can be. You can sort of definitively punish someone who upsets you, and if you're lucky that fictionalized punishment is long-lived. The story was published a short time after, in a forgotten literary journal.
4. A drama should last two or fewer minutes; comedy three. Anything longer and we run the risk of wearing out thin patiences, and we can't afford to do that to our subscriber base. O wait... we don't have a subscriber base; o that's good news. (When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose - ah, how does it feel?).
5. The next great threshold of research in performance: To technologize the audience; to find a way to automate them, or to downsize. And finally, to ultimately provoke: perhaps there is a way to fire them; because if you need an audience, you're somehow weak. Or perhaps, to engage them so they are no longer audience, but in some way participants. So theatre regains its original nature, a participatory celebration, where the audience can contribute - if not performance, perhaps tribute: an eyelash, a layer of skin cells, a skein of nerves.
6. If you want to have fun in the theatre, put on your goggles and shut everyone out. Theatre is isolation in a space of mutual communion; theatre takes place only in the mind.
7. Tom Stoppard said writing a play was the best way to argue with himself. That's fine long as you don't lose those arguments. The trick is to bury the argument into something that saves itself for later. You don't want the experience to argue with itself. The experience must seem to agree with itself. Then, after the audience leaves the theatre, the argument can form in their minds and they can draw rhetorical blood over dessert and coffee.
8. Some rather ego-maniacal among us think of humans as like unto Gods on this Earth. The present crises notwithstanding. But just remember: It’s a God eat God world out there.
9. Behold a new theory of vision to refresh our aching eyes. Behold the story of how our minds become. Behold the pang of something you lost a long time ago and can't live without. Behold the open blue sky beckoning you to realize what a human mind can do. Behold the thick glass wall that smashes down and tells you what a human mind can't do.
10. Using a low-voltage electric current, run through every seat in the theater, and near undetectable to the human nervous system, we devised a peer network that enables us to tap into and manifest the dreams of every spectator. Plus version 2.0 of this network will install local software in the brain of every spectator to allow them to exist simultaneously in a world of their own mutual devising. It's the ultimate in audience passiveness/participation/pleasuring. It could lead to new consumer products and tie-ins as well. Imagine an ad superimposed on the inside of your eyelids as you sleep.
11. Talk, talk, It's only talk. Arguments, Agreements, Advice, Answers, Art, Announcements. When will they start doing theatre in this place?
12. Second Confession: There really is a bridge upon which there's this house in Exeter, and the house was indeed rotting away and abandoned. However (more confession) it's not, as the play states, Polsloe Bridge Station but is instead some nondescript trestle stuck somewhere just outside town. And of course it's possible, since that was 26 years ago, that the nondescript trestle has somehow disappeared, or that the house has finally been razed. But I doubt it. These things have a tendency to stick around, don't they? 
13. Lose the masks, Noxzema the makeup. Wipe that smile from your face, wipe those features too; wear a white featureless mask and no hair; then allow yourself to be stamped with an identity someone else wanted to put there. When you remove a mask, make sure there is no makeup underneath. No warpaint.
14. Third confession: Already about 8 weeks before opening I started working on a string quartet (well Richard Schechner said theatre was becoming the string quartet, so now the string quartet is becoming theatre). The quartet would incorporate two movements roughly similar to the structure of the play, whose acts already had the subtitles I - Duets and Trios II - Grosse Fuga. So the quartet would be a two-movement work that featured thematic play between dual instruments in the first movement and a great fugue of all elements building in canons, inversions, rondos until all voices came together as one voice. 
15. What creature might be crawling from the slime? What sometime-notion might be rising from the dead?
16. Berkeley posited an existence where illusions were fed to willing minds; where minds met each other on a bare Adobe Flash stage. And we moved in deterministic circles according to our ActionScript. We bitblt ourselves in space, our surfaces replacing themselves over our backgrounds, maintaining our Z-Order so we don't become obfuscated by the world and its things.
17. We seem to have friends we only party with, friends to whom we bare ourselves, friends with whom we have only a few tenuous threads in common, friends that we only know through work or while searching for work. Are we coming to a place where we can no longer have a single definition for the word "friend?" Wait, is this really a new thing?
18. The new hallucinogens are called theatre. The new antidepressants are called theatre. The new soporifics are called theatre. The new antibiotics are not called anti-theatre.
19. Fourth confession: Age of six, Grandpa Giudice took me to a Broadway show, for which he was conducting the orchestra. I met Robert Goulet backstage. That was the trauma that planted the sand in my oyster. No, Robert Goulet was a perfect gentleman.
20. A New Theory of Vision is dedicated to 1234567890 Day. At 6:31 pm EST on Friday Feb 13, the Unix time will be 1234567890 - exactly that many seconds since the beginning of Unix time (Jan 1 1970). Another example of consummate perfection - time becomes not the tick that holds the reference points for memory, not the inexorable march toward terminus, not the scythe, but a simple point progression between items in a set made finite by its need to be defined by the conscious mind. There is no time if there is nobody to measure its passing.
21. Old is the new new. New is the old old. We are constantly renewed as each new technology washes over us. We adapt, accept, incorporate the new into our beings, until there is nothing left of the original us, until our core existence is diluted by each new model that impedes on our spiritual brand. And yet somehow that new self, whose cells have been completely replaced, still holds the same form as we originally had. 
22. Fifth confession: I never know what I'm really doing when writing a new play. Which is weird because I spend so much time reading plays and studying their structure. I like to think that the process of writing a play has become one of unconscious competence, where it's just the play's dialog, structure and sensorium are somehow flowing out of me and at some level what is being done is clear. But it's never like that. It's always, despite whatever process I think I'm using, a start-and-stop that consciously makes me feel incompetent. As a result, the act of composing a play is mostly an exercise in insecurity. "Is it bad? Did that work for you? Really???"
23. Watching the actors in A NEW THEORY OF VISION as they are absorbed, sucked into the digital projections, not merely surrounded by technical objects but actually obscured by them, one realizes that we now live in a time where many of us exist to each other only via technology. On the new "social networks" we reconnect with hundreds, even thousands of people who inhabited past parts of our lives, and also ghostly remnants of others whom we have never met but perhaps have something in common. We develop an online self - and some of us develop many of these - that serves as the butler to our new telepresence. It's only the keylight - that remnant of an older generation of technology - that restores the actors' faces and bodies to us. 
24. There's some talk about "levels" in our work on this piece. The piece specifies three "modes" of presentation. Each mode represents a means we have of mapping terms of our increasingly expanding sense of reality. There is the mode of what we call reality or sensorium. That is the most direct and manipulable aspect. We can pick things up, break them, burn them, make them, by manipulating them directly. They have smell (fresh cut wood), taste (a savory sauce), etc. The second level is the mind; where we have mapped these real things into categories, unities and from these ideas. This is the realm where we can start to be deceived, but that realm is still personal - nobody is truly in anyone's mind yet. Then there is the third space - this shared mental space where all our thoughts are beginning to drift around, the world of the online. This world we are still defining.
25. Although the play doesn't explicitly talk about work itself, the context of work is all-important. 200 years ago you farmed or made clothing or hewed wooden tables, holding the tools and working the materials yourself. 100 years ago we compartmentalized our activities into fragments, and did these tasks in increasingly automated and centralized ways. Now many of us work with tools that have no tactile reality - only pictures as tools - and we manipulate these using proxy tools that are nearly transparent to us (the keyboard, the mouse, the touch-screen). About the only work that hasn't changed fundamentally in nature is the telling of stories, and the stage. We still stand up on a platform, and we tell stories to each other, and despite the increasing technological nature of that stage, fundamentally we can still consider ourselves telling stories, around a campfire, person to person. And you have to love the basic, primitive nature of that.

In the Brooklyn Rail: Susan Bernfield Interviews Bob Jude Ferrante

From: the Brooklyn Rail, Critical Perspectives on Art & Culture

On the occasion of the Sanctuary: Playwrights Theatre's production of his new play A New Theory of Vision, playwright Bob Jude Ferrante virtually connects with Susan Bernfield (fellow playwright, and Artistic Director of New Georges theater company), over our shifting sense of reality, its representation on stage, and the dual role of being a playwright involved in producing one's own work.

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/03/theater/bob-jude-ferrantes-new-theory-of-vision

Website secret...

Psst... here's a secret few people will notice. 

The postcard on the site for A New Theory of Vision  is peppered with hyperlinks. each going someplace with a skeleton key to the play. 

Screens, screens, screeeeeeens

The Production Designer for A New Theory of Vision is named George Allison. He took a new play that asked the impossible:

• Change location in a split second
  
• People change into different people; hair changes color, face changes, clothing changes instantly in front of the audience
• People have to disappear onstage
• Three worlds must be depicted and clearly delineated: The world of reality (Cara's world); the online world (Erich's world); the world inside the mind (Lee's world). 
• Other characters have to be able to enter these worlds and it needs to be clear when they do.

 And came up with a unique, never-tried-before-I-think-at-least concept: that we would use screens onstage and digital projection to handle everything. This in itself is not revolutionary; in fact projection is becoming commonplace downtown as it's a "cheap" way to do a set. However, what makes George's approach so unique, really, is that:

• The projections are malleable in their visual language. For example, there's a scene online where a man is unmasked and revealed to be a puppet controlled by a character. When he is unmasked, the script just called for a makeup convention that was previously used for that character to be used to indicate he was a puppet. But George's concept was that, when he is unmasked, the screens flash front & profile shots (like mugshots) of the puppeteer. Friggin brilliant. Says it all.
• Likewise, there's a scene where a character tells a lengthy story and we're not supposed to hear all the details. The designer is created a video sequence where images from the story flash by quickly;  as if the information is being "rapidly downloaded." 
• Last, not only are the scenic elements designed to "take" projection - the actors are as well. Because the actors' clothing - and even masks - are designed to allow projection right onto the performer as a canvas. We can "rebrand" a performer with a new identity in a flash. 
• Etc.

We bet you can't wait to see it? 

Good, that's what we were hoping you'd say!

Why the hell design the sound?

So when I tell people I'm also designing the sound for A New Theory of Vision they look at me sideways (which is actually kind of cool to see... the eyes go vertical).

Don't know why absorb incredulity only to justify it in the blog... but here goes. The audio part of this play is for some reason locked up in my head, and Cat (the director) and I agreed that it needed to come out from there. 

Already about 8 weeks before opening I started working on a string quartet (well Richard Schechner said theatre was becoming the string quartet, so now the string quartet is becoming theatre). The quartet would incorporate two movements roughly similar to the structure of the play, whose acts already had the subtitles I - Duets and Trios II - Grosse Fuga. So the quartet would be a two-movement work that featured thematic play between dual instruments in the first movement and a great fugue of all elements building in canons, inversions, rondos until all voices came together as one voice.   

So that went pretty well (have only one final canon to complete before the quartet is done) and then it became clear the entire play had a very large soundscape - there are something like 170 sound cues in the production script, stemming from a catalog of hundreds of blended sounds. And all these sounds were still very specifically in my head. So I did some farming and recording and collating and then began assembling them all. Good thing the script is done!

The final sound canvas should be a lot of fun... evocative at times, spooky at others. 

Often I say that I write a play thinking of music in the structure, and now I'm actually bringing sound into the fabric of the play. Maybe this will be the first non-musical comedy with a cast recording? Hmmm... 

Tickets on Sale for A New Theory of Vision

Stoked! Tickets are on sale for A New Theory of Vision, which will run March 18 - April 11, Wed-Sat at 8PM at the Kraine Theatre, 85 E.4th Street (between Bowery and 2nd Ave). You just have to go to http://www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showCode=NEW156. 

The Web page is under way on the Sanctuary website too: www.sanctuarytheatre.org. We're building the ability for the poster on the page to be clickable to explore the ideas, events and characters of A New Theory of Vision.

Check it out!

lotsa

Excerpts from a manifesto-in-progress.

1. Disagree.
   
   
2. It is not possible to have fun in the theatre. Seats are too uncomfortable. Acting too mannered. Sets are too shoddy; lights too bright. Darkness too pervasive; humor too droll; tragedy too lachrymose.
   
   
3. A drama should last two or fewer minutes; comedy three. Anything longer and we run the risk of wearing out thin patiences, and we can't afford to do that to our subscriber base.
   
   
4. The next great threshold of research in performance: To technologize the audience; to find a way to automate them, downsize, and fire them. 
   
   
5. If you want to have fun in the theatre, put on your goggles…
   
   
6. Argue.
   
   
7. O wait, we don't have a subscriber base. Oh goody.
   
   
8. Behold a new theory of vision to refresh our aching eyes…
   
   
9. Using a low-voltage electric current, run through every seat in the theater, we have created a subnet that enables us to tap into and manifest the dreams of every spectator. 
   
   
10. Talk, talk, talk. When will they shut up and start doing theatre in this place?
    
    
11. Lose.
    
    
12. What creature might be crawling from the slime?
    
    
13. Berkeley posited an existence where illusions were fed to willing minds; where minds met each other on a bare Adobe Flash stage.
    
    
14. What sometime-notion might be rising from the dead?
    
    
15. Befriend.
    
    
16. The new hallucinogens are called theatre. The new antidepressants are called theatre. The new soporifics are called theatre. The new antibiotics are not called anti-theatre.
    
    
17. When I was five, my Grandfather took me to a Broadway show, for which he was conducting the orchestra. I met Robert Goulet backstage. That was the trauma that planted the sand in my oyster. No, Robert Goulet was a perfect gentleman.
    
    
18. A New Theory of Vision is dedicated to 1234567890 Day. At 6:31 pm EST on Friday Feb 13, the Unix time will be 1234567890 - exactly that many seconds since the beginning of Unix time (Jan 1 1970). Another example of consummate perfection.
    

Casting complete; first read-through

We're cast! And it will be:

• Lee: Eric Percival
  
• Cara: Maeve Yore
  
• Ted: Jullian Elfer
  
• Erich: Matt Steiner
  
• Jane/Hariko: Brooke Eddey
  
• MW/Susan: Sonya Tsuchigane
  
• GB: Lawrence Cantor

First read was tonight; read through the final production revision of the script, and though it's just as crazy as we always feared, it's also just as fierce as craziness permits. In short, it's another one of those ferrante comedies (people keep telling me I don't write comedies, I keep blinking and looking offended whenever they say that).

So far the process has been - as one would assume - stressful but fun. Cat is a dream of a director. No, back off, you can't have her! Mwah hah hah.

Next up: Manifesto of a theatre geek, part 176.

From A New Theory of Vision by bob jude ferrante
opening March 18 2009 at the Kraine Theatre:

JANE

I’ve been having this dream where I’m asleep.

LEE                                    

You’re… you’re always… asleep when you dream.

JANE

Excepting daydreams. And don’t give me Berkeley on the subject, we’ve had enough of that dim prat.

LEE

So… you dream you’re asleep.

JANE

And mum comes in, as usual paralytic, and starts the customary screaming at me.

LEE

And that’s it?

JANE

No it’s not bloody it. That’s when I wake up.

LEE

So then you’re awake?

JANE

No. I’m still asleep. And dreaming. And in that dream, in comes me mum.

LEE

Again?

JANE

Again. I’m afraid to sleep. I’m afraid of the dark.

LEE

There’s nothing to be afraid of in the dark.

(JANE cries)

JANE

Your dark isn’t my dark.

***

So yea... the script is in final production draft, the show is cast with the fabulous Cat Parker at the helm and genius George Allision doing production design. Poster design is done... have a look here. 

Hiring the Director

One very cool aspect (continuing on this idea of aspects, which should please the astrologically inclined among us) of being the playwright producer is being able to hire directors. Did I say that already? It bears repeating. 

During the past 8 weeks I had the distinct pleasure of talking to 13 directors - people I variously admired and perhaps had met at various openings around town, but with whom I'd never had the chance to discuss a project. 

Some conversations were briefer than others - after all A New Theory of Vision is a real project with a real production date which means some brilliantly talented directors had real and not-so-brilliant schedule conflicts. 

In some cases also - two specifically, the directors actually read the script and told me that the project wasn't right for the kind of work they liked to do. Which was an interesting response.Do you find that directors are more comfortable turning down work due to creative or stylistic conflict than actors? When I feel more secure in my work myself, someday, might be moved to then ask a director what specifically they didn't like (although one did proffer an explanation, which only led to more questions in my mind, but since they'd turned the project down, didn't want to waste their time).

In most cases however the directors said yes enthusiastically (a massive relief, referring to aforementioned insecurities)  and then I had the weird problem of trying to find a fit amongst a group of incredibly brilliant and talented people, in each case trying to tell them they weren't the only person I was talking to (not wanting to waste their time - OOB directing is a tough enough job) but also wanting to have a good strong sense of how they'd attack the material. Attack is the principal word.

In the end, Cat Parker turned out to have a great affinity for the material, and was also generally delightful to work with. I mean, all the directors I chatted with were friendly and cool, but Cat had a specific and southern warmth and charm to her as well besides being brilliant). 

One thing I did learn. Directors who work the NYC downtown theatre scene are universally intelligent and sharp. These are definitely people you want to hang out with.

What it's Like - The First Eight Aspects

Sanctuary's model for operating is that the playwright is the center of the company.  Not a guest, but the host. In the largest sense. Host and host body.

Although Sanctuary has done this service for several other playwrights now, none have written about what it's like. This seems to leave a big hole in the imagination. Something needs to fill it.

Writing about the experience documents critical parts of its dynamics; makes it more likely Sanctuary will reproduce these dynamics from playwright to playwright. These are the heart of what someone would call the Sanctuary experience. By nature it's an experience few will really have (and we're not sure if Sanctuary will last forever).

So since now the process has chosen me to be the playwright, I plan to document what it is like to be the playwright/producer on a Sanctuary show:

1. Thinking hard about the site and its properties. The shouting properties of the space; its posession and rights to its neighborhood; its sense of dominating energies, its radiances, its shortcomings.
2. Pondering how do you tell the story you want to tell beyond the page and how do you make the script fit the story you want to tell? The script becomes less your calling card and the dynamics of the event begin to supplant it. Then acting on what one infers. 
3. Hearing again all those voices arguing in one's head - characters, critics, supporters, the excited for yous, the tired of hearing its.
4. Having the joy of talking to so many smart directors and getting to choose the one that is organically "right" for the piece and its process. These guys are all uniformly amazing.
5. Knowing how much money there is to spend and figuring out which expenditures are more important. I know this sounds boring, doesn't it? But it's not. Money is the power to do what needs to be done - power is inherent. If we're talking about the power in theatre being given to the playwright, we have to mean - at least in part - that the money is under their control.
6. Realizing that in a sense everyone serves the script - the story, really. In that sense the playwright is yet another midwife.
   
7. Experiencing the exhiliration of juggling the text - largely an object to be heard - and its impacts in the other realms of sensation.
8. Sadly noting that this documentation - fascinating though it might be - must be created peripatetically, as finishing the script and making it acceptable as the controlling document for this event is far more important than documenting the process, however much an honor it is.