Filed by Bil at 11:41 am under Shameless Plugs, The Arts

My current project is a set of short comedies with the Dream Theatre Company. Something about this process disturbs me: we are less than two weeks from opening, and my lines are not memorized. Luckily, the script is only 7 pages or so, and I have several train rides between now and tech week. Maybe I’ll even work on it here at home. After this blog post. Wait…I’m hungry now. Okay, after this blog post I’ll eat lunch, and then after that, I’ll clean the dishes, and if I have some good cleaning momentum going, maybe I’ll clean the whole kitchen and then the TV/Wii room…My apartment is a finite space, so surely I will eventually clean it all. Then, after that’s done, I’ll get to studying my lines.

I’m the “straight man” in the piece I’m working on for Somewhere in Texas, which is probably where I belong in a comedy, but that’s not to say I have to relax and let someone else take the spotlight. The best straight-man characters aren’t “the not-funny one,” but rather a (somewhat more) normative foil to their socially-unfit counterpart. And all the while I struggle with death and growing up and moving on and all kinds of sad, heavy things that probably shouldn’t be funny.

Even though it’s short, this is going to be significant acting challenge…

Come see if I fail or not! We open July 16.

There’s a lot more to ruminate on…this blog post could have been huge. But, like I said: I’m hungry now.