Losing Louie

Losing Louie Diary - September 12, 2006

AAAAAAH!  Run-through today for the MTC creative staff.   Always a little scary when other people start to show up in the rehearsal hall, that safe little space that we’ve created.   They’re all great, none of them are strangers to me, but I always have to remind myself that they’re not a regular audience.  They’re not coming to the run-through to have a good time.  They’re there to work, so they’re responses might seem a little muted to us at times.  It like my dad always says about Hollywood studio execs.  When they hear a joke that they really like, they don’t laugh.  They get very serious and say “That’s funny.”

Losing Louie Diary - August 25, 2006

Okay, we’ve been at it for a week now, and I’m exhausted.  Still performing at night in Indian Blood.  I’ve never done this before, performed in one thing while rehearsing another.  All of my friends who are not in theatre ask me if I get my lines from one play mixed up with lines from the other, but of course that’s never a problem.  It’s physically tiring, because the hours add up to a lot, but that’s not even a real problem.  Anyone with kids is used to going without sleep for long stretches of time.  Here’s the real difficulty:  As my wife will tell anyone, when I’m doing a play, I might only have to get my body to the theatre by 7:30, but my head starts going there at about 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon.  I can’t get away with that now, ‘cause I’m still in the rehearsal hall for Louie at that time.  The other difficulty I’m facing is that I find myself thinking about Reggie (my character in Louie) when I’m standing the wings about to go on as Uncle Paul (one of my characters in Indian Blood).

Losing Louie Diary - August 18, 2006

Always an exciting day. Getting to meet the new people I don’t already know, and see the folks I already do or have worked with before. Nice to finally meet Simon, whose play I love. Great to see Mark, and to be sharing a stage with him, since my first Broadway gig was as his understudy in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, which was also directed by Jerry. I feel a little bit like I’ve been living here at MTC, since the show I’m in right now, Indian Blood, rehearsed here as well. But I love being here at the Creative Center. There’s always so much going on, and so many friends rehearsing other shows or auditioning that it seems like every day I bump into two or three people that it’s great to see. The first read through went very well, as they almost always do. That’s probably the last time it will seem that good for a while, as we start to take the pieces apart, dissect them and then try to put them back together again into something that has a real life of its own.