Load-in weariness

Yesterday we had load-in for Romeo and Juliet. Drained me earlier and harder than a load-in has in a long time. For the most part I like the experience of the cast coming together to do the necessary labor to make the theater our own; there is a real sense of satisfaction that comes from working hard and seeing the results of your efforts. But the longer it goes on the more you just want to be done with it, and I was getting kind of frustrated with the inefficiency and unhelpfulness of a lot of the people involved. I know we're limited by what needs done at the moment and how many of the appropriate tools we have, but I wish a lot of people were better at looking around and just finding work for their goddamn selves. If you can ask someone what to do, do it. If you can't, find something-- pick up screws, throw away debris, clean or straighten up something. Some, like Bernie, Plesser, and Charlotte, were amazingly hard-working and useful. Others were less so, and got on my nerves.

I also left at one, significantly earlier than I've ever left a tech week rehearsal before, but which was later than I probably should have and I'd put in seven and a half hours in already. On every other Hold Thy Peace show I've ever been in, and Romeo and Juliet makes my eighth, I stayed at build as late as I was needed and didn't go home until everyone else did. The worst of these was for Lear, when I stayed till four in the morning every night of tech week and which happened to fall during a period of extreme emotional distress, leaving me so drained and overtired I wrecked my car. Never want a repeat of that. And anyway, I have to get up for a real job these days, so I can't afford to make myself that blown.

One thing that really amuses me now is that I didn't realize how smoothly the Hamlet tech week went by comparison to the typical experience of moving a show into its performance space. Anyone who's done theater can tell you that the average production is one disaster after another, and it's only by the work of dedicated people fixing those disasters that the show goes off at all, much less well. It's kind of amazing when you think about it, how many elements must come together and do their job to make a show happen, so it's only natural that something with so many moving parts that they should be hard to coordiate and prone to malfunction. I remember being convinced throughout the process of Hamlet that everything was screwed up and behind schedule, when in actuality, at least compared to most shows, our rehearsals proceeded smoothly, our tech week was relatively easy, and most of the things that went wrong were handled with a minimum of struggle. Of course, it probably helped that our set was metal painter's scaffolds with cloth drapings and some banners hung from the fly system. And that when I wanted something done right, I almost always did it myself. The good part of it was I personally controlled everything to get the quality I wanted. The bad part was, Christ, that was a lot of work.