Four people enter a small room; only four come out

Day 6: Tuesday, February 21

As predicted, I’ve been sleepy most of the day. Fortunately, we didn’t start until noon (our rehearsals are mostly scheduled from 12:00 to 6:00), so I could sleep a little later than expected.

Sharing a bathroom is always tricky, so I have to admit I’ve been getting up a little early so I can be the first to get done. (Fortunately, there’s a powder room downstairs, so no one has to hold it if necessary. There’s no shower, though, so that part of the morning ablutions has to wait.) I was even done early enough that I had time for a quick nap before I had to leave.

We’re rehearing the next couple of days at a building on 29^th Street, so it’s not terribly far (about a 35-minute walk [and, yes, it’s west on 11^th, north on 4^th, then up Broadway, as everything seems to be for me]). I walked and it turned out that Beth (who had taken the subway) was right behind me. We took the elevator to the second floor (I didn’t see any stairs), and found our room, which was the approximate size of—well, I was going to say “phone booth,” but who knows what that means anymore? Suffice it to say, it was small, but since we were just sitting around the table and doing table work (reading through and discussing the script, rather than getting up and moving), we didn’t need much room. We went through the first three scenes of the show, paying particular attention to punctuation and indicated pauses (some of which had been overlooked in the rush to get the original production up), and it seemed to make a difference. The challenge for me will be to reconcile three things: staying true to that punctuation, seeming Beckett-like, and also seeming like a real human being. In a realistic sense, I should be able to do it (I’d better be able to do it … ); it’ll just add depth to what I did the last time. I’m just suddenly wondering if my previous fear of being over-rehearsed will lead to a feeling of under-rehearsal. (It shouldn’t; we’ve got all this week to do the table work and give a foundation to the blocking, which shouldn’t be substantially different from what we’ve already done—and we’ve got a week to review that before getting into the theatre.) 

 The room we rehearsed in. Actual size.

We broke at 5:00, and my potential plan was to spend the evening listening to Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks (a 1920s dance band that plays at a restaurant in the Theatre District every Monday and Tuesday), but I was just too darn sleepy to sit and listen for three hours. In spite of that torpor, I texted a friend about having dinner, and we settled on John’s Pizzeria, which is in the same area. We split a salad and a pizza, but by the end of the meal, I was all but falling asleep, so I decided to just come home, even if I decided to it by walking.

Once again, I hoofed it down Broadway to the East Village (you know the route by now), collected the mail (one of the three task requests from our hosts; the others are to water the plants, which I did last night, and to make sure the place is left as clean as we found it), came upstairs, planned to do a little surfing, but feel asleep for about an hour.

The Nighthawks (Vince Giordano is in the back

with the metallic bass)

I eventually roused myself, watched some television, wrote a little—I am not caught up, daywise—and will soon be looking at my lines for tomorrow and getting a little more sleep than usual (I might even get eight hours!). It’s Beth’s birthday tomorrow, so she’s got the day off from rehearsal, which means she shouldn’t be needing to use the bathroom at the same time as I, so I can get up about a half-hour later than I did today, before I head off. (And Friday will be even better, since we’re rehearsing here.)
 
We’ll break at 5:00 again tomorrow, and I have tickets to Arthur Miller’s The Price at the American Airlines, so I’ll have a couple hours to kill before curtain. It’s one of those time slots that it doesn’t make sense to come all the way back here, so I’ll probably find someplace where I can get a cup of tea and read.