Transitions

Day Two of The Psyche Project intensive.

We're not out of the woods yet, but we've got a compass, a map, and good boots. Thank God. This one hasn't been easy. I think I got lazy...third and fourth time out collaborating with a couple of the folks involved, started to think we were okay glossing over some of the HARD, SWEATY LABOR of painstaking communication.

Nope.

Guess what. If anything, you have to work HARDER to keep from making (unsafe) assumptions. A good lesson, if not always a pleasant one. But we're on track, if a little bruised.

THIS is NOT a post about the "trials and tribs" of collaboration.

It's about TRANSITIONS

The show is starting to take shape. With zero tech time, eight hours total of official time in the space, a cast of about a dozen, five hundred scene changes (blame the playwright), nine thousand props (blame the director) and twenty million costumes (blame the...I don't know who), the transitions are...a little scary. Make that terrifying.

Then I think about "Portrait," which had five actors, eleven scene changes, two dozen props and really not that many costumes...and the scary thing was STILL the transitions.

Transitions, friend, don't MAKE a show. But they can break one.
Why?
1) Maybe they're the last thing we think about. Transitions usually fall somewhere between "make sure the actors aren't naked" and "make sure there's a curtain call" on the to-do list.
2) Maybe because they're HARD. There's a lot of nitty-gritty detail in a transition -- that's where your average team will want to put light and sound cues, that's when the actor who was taking a cigarette break is rushing to get through the green room to reach his entrance. There's a lot that can go wrong.
3) Maybe because they're "neither here nor there." Most theater practitioners are concerned, as Dietz would say, with "Taking the Play to the Story." This means that EVERY SCENE revolves around an important piece of information necessary to move the story forward. The transition is, on one level, an embodied ellipses, the "dot dot dot" saying "and then some things happened that you DON'T need to see before we get to the next thing you DO."

This, at least, is one way to look at transitions.

Then again.

You might also say: Every play is its own universe. It tells a story, yes, but it does so by creating its own logic, a language of movement and objects and light and sound and space.
And if transitions are a place where we are forced to employ ALL our theater-making tools in order to move forward, then they're also a built-in chance to REFINE or REDEFINE the (okay, if I'm using this word wrong, forgive me or correct me -- clearly I'm on a tear tonight) semiotic landscape of the production.

Nutshell: every transition is an opportunity to hit the "reset" button on the world of your play.

As such, the transition is your play's moment of maximum possibility. Use it to your advantage. Ignore it at your peril.