Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. —Henry Fielding

12 October 2004

Penis

Rehearsal went extremely well again today. I don't know what it is.

Tomorrow will probably be awful; I doubt it, though.

I am continually surprised that some actors are intimidated by or afraid of me. I think it's weird. I always act like I have no idea what's going on. I behave as though I'm drunk. Do they think I'm going to up and yell at them all of a sudden.

An actor thanked me for being nice to him today and I though "gee, sure, I guess." Why would I be rude?

The designer brought in the penis sculpture. It's hilarious.

I tried to show the four kids in the show how to get a laugh from a pratfall. I wanted them to do the standard four-people-falling-each-other-too-closely-one-stops-too-quickly-all-collide laugh. Without even telling Matt and Kevin what to do, I said "let's get a laugh" and made the kids watch. Kevin and Matt and I did it and it was funny. The kids tried: not funny at all. We had to move on, but we can work on the pratfall tomorrow.

I added other laughs into the show tonight, too. I amaze myself with my own ability to create humor onstage. I knew that I could get a laugh with this one moment in Act One, Scene 6. The moment involves six people, so it took a while. We must've run this single sequence at least twelve times before I liked it. What's amazing is that in theory, each time I run it becomes less funny, but what I really needed to do was perfect the moment. So I tweaked it, and then I tweaked it again. Changed the blocking, then changed it again. Then I got a laugh. Sally and Matt Guerra and I burst out laughing when they did it the umpteenth time or whenever it was, and the previous time they had done it hadn't been remotely funny. Comedy is so amazing.

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