The Next Thing

My play opens this week – the play I’m directing with my drama class at school. We have one more dress rehearsal on Tuesday, then we perform Thursday and Friday. Yeah . . . it’s crunch time.

I love this group of students, but teaching my drama class always challenges me. We meet twice a week for one hour each time. I schedule some after school rehearsals during the second semester, but I can’t do too many. Those of you who have done theatre understand how painful those time constraints are. 

And the majority of my kids this year (and many years) are brand new to the stage. They’re still working on basics like speaking loud enough to be heard. And slow enough to be understood. Not turning their backs on the audience. Sigh . . . basics. And that’s good – they need to learn the basics. And I do have a handful of veterans that I can rely on for more than that. They're all working hard. They're all doing their best. 

Still . . . this is a stressful week.

The local youth theater I work with does a New Play Festival every couple years – a two-week summer camp where students perform in student-written and student-directed plays. My daughter was in the first one a few years ago; she wrote and directed her own play, and I was mentoring her and the other playwright/director. I remember when my girl was done blocking the play and settled in to work her first scene with the actors. It was about a two-minute scene, a very brief intro to the action of the story. She worked with her two actors for 45 minutes. When she was done, she had everyone take a break and sat by me exhausted.

We were quiet for a bit, and then I said, “You know, you can’t do that with every scene in the play. It will take all year.” She nodded.

That’s when I explained to her the principle I had learned over my years of directing . . . and actually, this was the moment when I first articulated this principle for myself, too. “You can’t fix everything you want to fix. Particularly with the new actors who are still trying to remember to face front and talk loud. Pick the one thing – maybe two things – that will make the biggest difference in the scene. Just work on that. If they get that down, awesome: pick the next thing to work on. You have to accept that it’s not going to look like the picture you have in your head. But it’s going to get better than it is right now.”

That’s where I was last week with my play, and where I am this week. What are the one, two, maybe three things that will make the biggest difference? Give each actor one thing to focus on improving. Turn up your volume switch. Make your reactions bigger. Remember to get this set piece on in time. That’s enough.

And it’s enough for me, too, right? Y’all, when I look at my Self and all the many things I should be doing or changing or emphasizing or improving . . . I’ve got a ponderous list. But I can’t fix it all. Some of it I can’t fix at all – that’s God’s work to do. I pick the one thing – maybe two things – that will make the biggest difference in my Self right now. Just the one next thing. That’s it. That’s all.

And that’s enough. (It’s enough for you, too, friend.)