Ben & Babs: hitting the ground running.

If January is indicative of how the rest of the year is going to unfold, it will be productive, busy, fun, and fairly successful. However, I won't get much reading done...

Ben has been working hard on Questions of the Heart. Mid-month he performed the show at our church building as a fireside. Ben wrote a great post about it on his website. The discussion afterwards was incredible. In fact, the whole evening was rather surreal, especially for Ben. He's had several productive discussions with the Bishop and a handful of others about what would make it an even better fireside in the future, for various types of wards. Through this fireside, Ben has made some incredible connections and received encouragement to add ways to donate to the show. We also have two additional performances in Bloomington lined up, one before, and one after the Frigid Fringe Festival in NYC.

The Primary Room transformed into a performance space.

Along with assisting Ben with his show stuff I opened my thesis production, Woyzeck. The show is known as the "first working-class tragedy" or the "first modern tragedy" and is about a poor man trying to make it as best he can but is ultimately driven to insanity and violence. It's pretty strange (the playwright died before it was finished) and dark, but I love it! I chose it because the story is fascinating (it was based on the crime that used the first "insanity plea") and it lends itself to being highly stylized, which I hadn't done yet and, frankly, slightly terrified me. It has been an incredible experience and I have loved working with the director (who I worked with on Waiting for Lefty) and design team. With the production up and running I will have my thesis defense in a couple weeks and can focus on writing the accompanying paper about the process of designing the show. That will be due towards the end of the semester, so I'll be chipping away at it over the next couple months.