Minimum Verbosity: Relections on Production

So the show is closed now, and how do I feel about the experience?

Ambivalent.

I've always had a weird love-hate relationship with this particular show, more so than the others -- for predictably pompous reasons: that I feel that I can defend all the others intellectually, that they're all trying to do the lofty, ambitious things that I went into theatre to do. That if they fail, I can point at them with pride and say that I was undertaking something worth doing. That if I failed, I failed from over-reaching myself, and ultimately, I can live with that knowledge.

This one? Not so much. It's a silly farce, skating aimlessly from one gag to another under the barest semblance of a plot. It's utterly inoffensive, utterly unchallenging, and...

...and it's a good show.

Anyone who knows me knows what a big deal it is for me to say that about anything I've done. But, yeah. It's not perfect. There's scenes that don't really hang well together, transitions between thoughts that are abrupt and awkward. But overall? It's funny. It's *funny*. And part of its virtue *is* its inoffensiveness -- it's the one show we've done that I feel like I can invite anyone to. (It's the one show we've done that doesn't drop the F-bomb -- and the one show we've done that doesn't contain references to rape. What the hell do I have floating around my subconscious, anyway?)

Moreover, it contains material that Siarde and I have been touring for over a year now. It's solid, if not polished. Part of the advantage of doing a remount -- and I'm sold on them now, incidentally -- is that they're a lot more *fun*. For the most part, we've spent our time in the trenches, finding which gags didn't work. The ones we have now we can deliver with ease and confidence. We're free to be a lot more playful than we are with a premiere.

No, it's further than that, isn't it? All the shows play to different parts of my personality, and most of the others play to the sophisticated urbanite that I like to pretend that I am. Whereas this one -- this is not that. This is a show by the geeky little Chinese kid who used to run in circles for hours being chased by invisible monsters at recess. And I've tried to distance myself from him -- but I am him, too.

And that doesn't have to be a bad thing.