So yesterday was more of the sitting and the watching of the television until I had to get up to go see Cynthia's show.

It is a script of Le's called The Hanging of Razor Brown, a wonderful script about secrets and lies and inevitability and punishment and it takes place in Steinhatchee, FL in the early part of the last century.

We originally did it some years ago with Tracy playing the lead, and she was quite wonderful, she set the bar extremely high, but Cynthia's performance was right up there with hers. She played a teacher of young girls, trying to teach them manners and class.

The show starts out with a very funny French lesson, the girls reading Phaedre astonishingly badly, with Cynthia trying to get them to read with more feeling, and it's really funny and light and disarms the audience, until Cynthia says the following passage:

"There are just too many distractions outside for you three. I suppose you're thinking about those boys in the town square, I suppose that's it. Well, I can assure you that we will finish our discussion of Phaedre and if you don't settle right now, we'll go back into the house and you won't be allowed to watch the hanging!"

And the whole audience just rocks back. Even if you are expecting it, even if you know the show, even if you have noticed the title of the play, that line is so shocking that it just freezes you to the spot.

This was a really quite good production (surprisingly good, considering how difficult parts of the rehearsal process were, or so a little bird told me) of an excellent play.

I was offered the show, in a sort of sideways manner, I was sort of felt out as to whether I would be interested in directing it, but I felt that I wouldn't have enough rehearsal time with my going to Los Angeles for Christmas. I know I love short rehearsals, but this show is a full-length and it's a bear and I would have wanted to do it justice.

Watching the show, I thought about things that I would have done differently. There were some period and dialect problems with the actresses playing the young girls, mostly because they didn't deal with that until the end of the rehearsal process.

I believe very strongly that these things need to be dealt with early so that they are second nature and don't go out the window when you start emoting all over the place. I wanted to grab all of them (Cynthia included, actually) and make them stand up straight. I could hear myself if I had directed this saying, "If you do not stand up straight right now I will strap a board to your back!" Probably a good thing I didn't direct it.

Mostly the stuff I would have fixed was small, like the eyelines. Everyone spent a good deal of time staring out into the house and off stage left, and never was anyone looking at the same spot. Nothing annoys me more than having four or six people staring out, talking about the same thing, and having them looking variously at a space of about six feet wide.

My favourite, though, was when one actor looked offstage and said, "Look, here comes Robert Price!" and he was looking up at the sky! Was he flying through the air, I wondered.

The other thing I would have corrected was Brian's face.

Brian, dear Brian, whom I was in love with in my last show, and who is a good, though inexperienced actor, was extremely good in this show, he really did a lovely job, except for, you know, The Face.

He was playing a man who does a very bad, very immoral thing, but also in the play he tries to do a good thing, so therefor you cannot describe the character as purely bad. So why he chose to make The Face was beyond me.

The Face was a combination of The Grinch and, at first I thought Carl in Sling Blade, but I realized that that was just because Brian has a big chin, and The Face was really Jack Nicholson in The Shining. It was the kind of Face where if someone wandered up to Cynthia's character and made that Face, she wouldn't have said "Mr. Price, you are intoxicated," but instead, "Help! Help! Don't come nearer! You have an axe somewhere, don't you? Redrum! Redrum!!!"

Perhaps I exaggerate. Nope, I don't. I would have slapped that Face right off of his head, baby, because the performance was really good and it was a shame to dilute it with this cartoon villain's Face.

These are small adjustments, really, details. The story was served, the emotion was strong, the performances were pure, particularly Cynthia's. I'm so glad that I dragged myself out of the house, which, when I haven't moved for an entire weekend, the entropy is extremely hard to overcome in order to get my ass moving into Manhattan at 9p on a Sunday night.

Today's horoscope:
Today you need to use your mind in accomplishing something. Achieve through your intellectual abilities or communication skills.

One year ago today:
Joaquin Phoenix had just as rotten an accent as he did in Gladiator, but I have started to be able to see past that...

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Last Updated Wed 6 February 01:13:09 2002