The Lab is Over, Alas for Mankind.

The Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab has come and gone, and after doing nothing but wrangling with Strindberg's A Dream Play for three weeks straight, now that it's over, it already feels, ironically enough, like some kind of strange dream. People keep asking me, "did you learn a lot?" and I honestly don't know the answer. I certainly took in a lot of information - now time will tell whether or not I'll synthesize it into anything useful. Anne Catteneo, the Lab's relentlessly hard-working director, says that it could perhaps take four years to really process everything that you learn in these three weeks. It was director boot-camp, there's really no other way to put it. Exhausting, challenging, frustrating, eye-opening, and leaving it behind is bittersweet. As we came toward the end, I was running on fumes. The countdown became my mantra: "Three more days. Two more days. One more day." I don't think I moved on Sunday after it ended. But now, I keep thinking of my little yellow ID pass, how I wish it didn't say, "Expires July 17th" so that I could walk through the Lincoln Center stage door again, head to the rehearsal rooms in the basement, and go again.

But Strindberg himself, I think, said it best:

In the moment of goodbye,
When one must be parted from a friend, a place,
How suddenly great the loss of what one loved,
Regret for what one shattered.
Oh, now I feel the agony of existence!
So this is to be mortal...

One wants to go, one wants to stay.
The twin halves of the heart are wrenched asunder.

And I've found that, whatever my difficulties with A Dream Play - and I have many - Strindberg often says it best.

I'm sifting through all my notes, re-typing and summarizing the experience, in an attempt to get a handle on it all before it slips away. I'm hoping to have some more detailed blog posts about it in the near future too - but more on that later. But while I'm processing all that, if I learned anything from the experience it would be:

1. Trust your actors.
2. Trust your collaborators.
3. Always say yes before you say no.

More later. For now, back to attempting to pick up my life where I left it a month ago.

Rapture After the Rapture

For all my joking about it, I am strangely grateful that nobody got raptured yesterday.

"Don't tell anybody, but I'm kind of scared," I told my friend in the car yesterday, as the hour approached 6pm.

"Why?" he asked incredulously and, let's face it, probably a little disdainfully.

"Because, okay, I don't believe in a God that condemns anyone to an eternity of pain and suffering in general, and I certainly don't believe in a God that chooses not to reveal himself to his creation and then condemns us to that same eternity of pain for not believing. It's like some sadistic test, it doesn't make sense to me. I can't get behind that."

"Right."

"But we don't know. Maybe there is some perverse, sadistic, self-involved divine entity up in the clouds that wants us all to suffer fire and brimstone for not worshiping at his feet. How do we know?"

"That's true," said my friend.

"We don't know anything. Maybe the Greeks were right, how do we know? Maybe it's Zeus up there - why not? Why assume that God, if there is a God, is ultimately a good, loving or fair?"

Why, I sometimes ask myself, this faith in justice? There's something in us that believes innately in fairness - life SHOULD be fair, and (maybe I'm just speaking for myself) there's a little part of us that is surprised every time, over and over again, when it's not. And God is the ultimate Should, the way it's supposed to be, the path we always see unfolding before us but never manage to travel down.

But listen. We learn early on (and then again and again) that life isn't fair, despite this thing inside us that tells us it should be. Why, in that case, believe that God is?

For my part, I choose to have faith in something greater than ourselves and to believe that it is ultimately good, loving, and, yes, fair. I believe this because - honestly? - it seems like a happier way to live than believing in the alternative, despite the fact that, when you think about it, any of it could be true. So I suppose that today, the day after "Apocalypse Not Yet," I'm grateful because, for a little while at least, I get to keep my faith in the way things should be.

Thankful for Douglas Adams

So, this past Wednesday was the anniversary of Douglas Adams' death, and although I'm two days late on the jump, I don't want to let the day pass completely without comment.

I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy my sophomore year of college, while going through, well, what in hindsight can only really be called "rough time." I was in the midst of a kind of identity crisis at the time - fearful of my future and anxious and terrified of the person I felt I was becoming; I felt alienated and disconnected from all the people I loved the most; I was beginning to question my until-then unshakable faith in some kind of inherent beauty and goodness in the universe. I cried a lot. I had trouble sleeping most nights.

I needed a distraction and, in desperation on one of my worse nights, I picked up my roommate's complete Hitchhiker "Trilogy".

It turned out to be exactly what I needed. Arthur Dent's hilarious and bizarre wanderings across the universe took me as far away from my earthly problems as I needed to be. And yet, at the same time, with it's wry yet loving observation of the weirdness of the human condition, it quietly, gently, humorously brought be back to solid ground.

Adams reveled in the weird, random, inexplicable mess we call life (the answer to life, the universe and everything is… 42?). He didn't shy away from the disorder and the chaos, the misery and mystery of it all. Instead, he exalted it. It all became part of a kind of fabulously funny, existential inside joke. And in hindsight, this was exactly what I needed. At a moment when I was quickly losing faith in any kind of benevolent order, Hitchhiker helped me peer into the abyss I was facing and laugh at it a little.

In essentially the very first page of the very first book, Earth as we know it is blasted into smithereens. If you haven't read it, that should tell you something about the series right there. In subsequent books, Earth sort of has a tendency of popping back in and out of the picture, thanks to some traveling through alternate dimensions (and possibly time?). Now, maybe this is a rumor, but I'm told that Adams never truly completed the series; the book it ends on is not really meant to be the final word, but Adams died before he was able to write another one. Still, the ending of the series is surprisingly appropriate: in it, every incarnation of every version of Earth in every dimension of space and time is permanently and irrevocably destroyed.

When I read the last page, I had to laugh. It would end like that, wouldn't it? And that's what Hitchhiker did for me in a nutshell: yes, it blew up the world, but somehow, it made me okay with it.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is, I owe Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker series an enormous debt of gratitude. So- so long, Mr. Adams, and thanks for all the fish.

And here's a link to an article of his I posted a few days ago, which is brilliant and funny and a little mind-blowing in its prescience: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet.