Passing Through the Dark

Time was, I was doing a lot of plays, one right after the other, not all of them plays I was particularly interested in doing, but I did them anyway. It was good practice. Now that I'm both producing and directing, I have more of a say in the scripts I work with.

That's a good thing - and a bad thing, too. A good thing because it's rewarding in ways hard to imagine. A bad thing because I end up scared and worried the production won't work for my audiences.

This play I'm working on now, Hugging the Shoulder, means a lot to me. It's an original work, never been published, and it speaks to me in ways not many plays do. It's a story about brothers - and my own blood family is only my two brothers and me now - and it's a story about guilt and loneliness and the journey through darkness toward a hoped-for day of reconciliation. I love the beautiful, wounded losers whose story the playwright, Jerrod Bogard, tells. We're all of us wounded in some way, after all.

I love, too, the fact that Jerrod has built his play out of bricks. It's structurally sound and built to withstand the weather.

I'm working with a gifted cast. The first couple of weeks of rehearsal were awkward for me as I tried to learn their languages. I've made some progress there, and we are beginning to cohere. Like stone and mortar maybe? They're good, and it's apparent they have as much regard for the play as I do.

If you happen to come across these words sometime, Jerrod, I'm just trying to say, "Thanks."