The Official WL Studio Theatre blog

Saturday, May 29, 2004

Reporting live from Quesnel...

It's 1:42 on Saturday. Our Friday night performance is done. The Saturday morning coffee critique is done. Post-coffee-critique lunch (Granville's) is done. We're all now officially off-duty. All we have to do now is relax, drink, and wait to take home some awards.

The trip up yesterday went well enough -- I travelled with Andrew Rook in the u-haul carrying the entirety of our set -- though we did have a brief encounter with some potentially bad karma on the journey. A family of geese decided that the middle of the highway was a perfectly good place to stop for a rest. By the time we figured out what it was on the road we were hurtling towards, there wasn't any time to avoid them (without running the risk of putting ourselves in danger) and...well, I don't know how to put this delicately...let's just say that not all the baby geese survived.

Being someone who gets emotionally shaken up everytime I kill a spider, the death of a few baby geese didn't sit terribly well with me. But there wasn't a whole lot that either of us could have done (well, even less that I could have done, being a passenger and, therefore, relatively useless).

We kept the story of the geese to ourselves until after the performance. No sense in spreading any of that bad karma around.

And, as it turned out, the bad karma had zero effect on the performance, which was fantastic, complete with a responsive audience of about 40 people (which, I think, actually beats any of the houses from WL, except *possibly* that last Saturday night).

We weren't completely free of technical issues. The TVs refused to work properly (*that* was probably Karma related) and at about 6:50, I gave up on getting them all functioning, and just ran with a single working television, arguing that one is leaps and bounds better than none.

Outside of that, there were a couple of small lighting glitches and one small sound glitch, but for a set that was put together in four hours in a space we had never used before, I couldn't possibly ask for any more than what we got last night. And in the good karma department, it appeared that we had a couple of folks depart at intermission. Which might not normally be taken as a good omen, but given that we had at least a few departures during our run in Williams Lake, this just struck me as further evidence that we were *on* last night, hitting them where it hurt (though, according to the adjudicator, we should have been hitting them harder and more violently...which I don't disagree with, but I'm not sure we could have survived having any more people storm out at intermission during our WL run...)

Anyway, to put it simply, we had a fantastic show last night.

Same can be said for the critique this morning. The adjudicator was carefuly to ensure that we were all aware that we had put together a great show, and the issues he wanted to discuss were just in relation to taking it just one or two steps further, and making the show just that small little bit better. And I really had no disagreements with anything that he had to say about improving the show. In fact, I often found myself shocked at his brilliant suggestions that had simply never even entered my mind.

So, mission accomplished. The coffee critique was the exact learning experience that I was hoping it would be. No one got ripped apart, no one took offense to anything that was said, and I learned a whole bunch of valuable stuff that I'll be taking with my into the next play I have anything to do with.

Thanks again to the Studio Theatre for giving me the go ahead to do this play in the first place, and then continuing to spend money on this gigantic loser in order to bring it Quesnel. I've had a fantastic time, and I'm looking forward to the banquet tonight.

The hard part is done. It's downhill from here. Or uphill. Dammit, I can never remember which one it is. Uphill...downhill...whatever.

Photos to come as soon as I return to WL.

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