On this day ...


This popped up on Facebook because I posted it two years ago today. I think it's worth re-posting here as a little slice of what they call "actor life." 


April 19, 2020

Amazingly alive, creative day today! It started off with an online, group audition for a new show by Dacha called Funfair. I really wasn't sure how it would work on Zoom but it did.
The first energizing, magic part is when you break into small groups and create a scene from nothing. You get a few prompts and a few minutes and then they say "go!"
Our little group was on fire. We created a whole world in six minutes and presented it to the other dozen or so actors and the creative team. I was so proud of our cohesion and our artistry. The other groups were just as good.
Then we moved on to the one-on-one part. I got to create a character, again from basically nothing and have her go interact with one of the members of the creative team. I was this whole other person, Daisy Lansing, on a Disney cruise with her three card-playing friends. And for those couple of moments, Daisy was a real person in the world, as real as Jessica Fletcher or J.R. Ewing, anyway.
Later, again for Dacha, it was my day to do our daily 5:00 pm story time reading [we were doing this online during the early days of the pandemic]. I read two Chekov stories, Vanka first and then After the Theater. Again was an opportunity to spin a world into being.
I don't know if I can explain how gratifying it is to do this, to bring something into the world that was never there before, present it, and let it go.

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