Saturday, April 28, 2007

MONOPOLY! is coming

It's the final four performances of INVINCIBLE SUMMER at ART--the insanity of the last week has finally receded a bit, letting me surface long enough to post this before diving in to these final performances, and prepare to switch over to MONOPOLY! It's strange to think that soon I won't be telling this particular story every night, as I have grown very used to INVINCIBLE SUMMER over the last month, but that's the rare joy of my particular form--it won't die when I put it down, but simply sleep and wait until I tell it again in the future. It makes the closing less bittersweet than a traditional production, but I'll miss this run all the same--it has been punctuated by so many strange events, above and beyond my notes being destroyed in performance, that we've joked that it's a cursed production. Cursed or not, we'll ride it into the ground this weekend, and I hope to do it proud.

We met with Derek yesterday to discuss changes for MONOPOLY!--we're planning on changing a number of variables in the space, with a new table, new seating and new lighting to accentuate the very real differences between the two works. INVINCIBLE SUMMER is much more gut and heart driven, whereas MONOPOLY! is more cerebral, with more intertwined storylines that lie against one another, so we're hoping to build a different vocabulary of lights to guide people through. It will be very interesting to have an audience versed in one monologue see MONOPOLY!--it's a rare opportunity to develop work that builds on one another, and see what that achieves.

For my part, I have been looking over the outline loosely, but this weekend in the heat of INVINCIBLE SUMMER I will have to start really turning MONOPOLY! on to have it fully ready in time--a one day turnaround is hard, but we knew that going in, and I think with the right mindset it's completely doable. It's times like these I am grateful the monologues are not memorized by performed extemporaneously--I don't think I'd be nearly as flexible were it the other way.

Crossposted to the ART blog