eustress
in which IRON JOHN is freakin' happening, you get tickets to the Rockwood Residency, and I have a cold.
Hey Hartlist,
“Mr. Fennyman, let me explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.” - Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love
Every rehearsal process there’s a point where I start repeating this quote to myself as a perverse form of self-soothing.
JUST THE GIGS
The Monthly Band Residency Begins!
FRIDAY 2/24 7PM -Tickets Here or cash at door -Special guest Susie Greenebaum, violin
FRIDAY 3/31 7PM - Tickets Here or cash at door
FRIDAY 4/28 7PM - Ticket link forthcoming, or cash at door!
FROM THE CHRYSALIS
Achoo.
Ah, the mid-rehearsal process Common Cold. How I’ve missed you. You were once as regular a part of my life as unmasked subway rides, or dating.
Or is this just how I respond to excitement or an abundance of joy? Two possibilities: my body is saying whoa there, slow down … OR it’s a sneaky form of self-sabotage, like, I don’t know, getting Covid for the first time on the way to a long-planned grownup vacation in Greece. As in, That’s enough joy for you, missy, time to take it down a notch!
(I can’t prove that I did that to myself, of course. And I probably got this cold from my collaborator Jacinth, and maybe that’s just the price of being Out There again.)
Long story short: I’m working again, I have a cold, and I’m complaining about it, which means I AM VERY HAPPY.
There’s really nothing like the feeling of doing exactly what you are Meant To Be Doing. I was in the Irish Arts Center elevator today, sneezing leaving rehearsal, and I thought, It really is true, it doesn’t take more than a few things to make me happy. It’s just that they’re very specific things.
“Having a group of talented and very well-cast actors perform a piece that I wrote with a brilliant collaborator and the right director” is pretty high up on the list, as it turns out.
This is where I say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who donated to make this reading possible!!!
ALSO, YOU CAN STILL DONATE and WE WILL STILL USE IT!1
There’s a lot of things I want to say but mostly I want to get this newsletter out and I need to go buy more tissues. Two things I’ll leave with: 1) The “Doing What You’re Meant to Do” feeling is not the same as “Happy” and 2 ) “Happy” is not the same as “everything’s going perfectly”. I learned a new word recently that maybe you know already: eustress. It means good stress; the kind of stress that is actually beneficial. It comes from, say, working at something we care about, and it’s What Gives Life Meaning, not to put too fine a point on it. It is also, I would say, is what makes Actual Happiness possible.
There’s a lot of evidence to support the idea that what we need to be “happy” is not, in fact, an unbroken stream of vacations, but a really good problem to solve. (Plus some vacations.) My fave modern guru Martha Beck (yes, her again) says that people are afraid of the directive “Do what you really want to do”, because if we all did what we truly wanted, “Wouldn’t we just lie around on a beach all the time and eat candy?” Martha’s response to this is something like: maybe? for a couple of days? After that you’d probably get bored and start looking for a project.
Our “natural condition” is not, in fact, sloth, but curiosity. We bend toward Creation.
We decided to go ahead with the Iron John reading for real exactly one month ago. As in, we can still do it… IF we start Right Now. We raised the money, contracted a General Manager, put together the perfect cast, rewrote key scenes and songs, raised the money again, cold-called strangers and reminded acquaintances and now have a full RSVP list (modest room, at capacity) for Monday afternoon. We did this as a team (me, Jacinth, our director Chloe, and our GM Rashad.)
(Being on a great team, as it turns out: also one of my Specific Things.)
And, also: we didn’t have a lead until two days before we started, we’ve had someone out sick for two days of five, the score is kind of too much for one MD in 29 hours and now Jacinth is also playing the whole thing, if I never spend another minute deciding who will read stage directions aloud it’ll be too soon, we will not get to run the show in sequence even once before we perform it, and I’d really like to have a few words with whoever over at Actors’ Equity decided that 29 hours was, like, the correct number of hours to prepare a reading of every single show on earth.
…The natural condition, etc etc etc, see Stoppard quote above.
But at the end of day Friday, Jacinth looked around, said “We did it”, and fist-bumped me while I coughed into a napkin.
And he’s right. We have absolutely no control over what’s next, who actually shows up Monday, who will actually want to work with us to move the show forward. Either way, there will be a whole new round of challenges. But we did this, and I am ready.
Eustress, I Stress, We All Stress. Thank god for that.
Speaking of being on a great team, I’m off to rehearse the Wrong Band for the FINAL FRIDAYS of the next three months, Rockwood Music Hall.
Stay healthy, see you there,
Rebecca
IRON JOHN 29-HOUR READING is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of IRON JOHN 29-HOUR READING must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.