RELAXED CONCENTRATION

Second show today. Matinee. Matinees are hard. This was print number 2/5. Perhaps better forgotten. We were the first show of the day. "Door in five minutes." The stage-manager said. Suddenly it's time to go. I have three wardrobe changes, in a tiny dark hallway behind the curtain. In that moment it seems hard to connect the piles of wrinkled clothes, stuffed in a plastic bag of course, to the entity of the performance which we create. Sanctity.
My first scene on stage is purely corporeal. Doc. I attack another character. Kick him and beat him senseless. Stuff him into a wheelchair. Dress him like a rabbi. I exit.
I return. Hot. The monlogues. About 15 minutes of work. I engage the audience. I make eye-contact with everyone in the house. One by one. And then off I go, shadow-boxing, stream of consciousness. My strongest identification with this character I play, is the bad lieutenant. Flow. Adversarial. As they are. The audience is inherently adversarial. They're watching for you to fuck it up. They look for the seams. Sons of bitches.
Tonight I blanked. The text was gone. The past second dissapeared without a trace. So much for mind. Don't trust it. I just stood there breathing. How long? Me and the house. Do they know. Just hanging out. I saw a sudden flutter of movement in the booth behind the seats. Line please. I'd fallen down in a puddle of watter five minutes before. How bad is this.

"There were little tags on everything, naming the world." I said finally. I'd found a trace. Oo. How many lines of the monologue had I flubbed. About ten, single-spaced. Maybe Eight. Keep going. Definite loss of glow.

I'd went further out on the limb. I did not know the text well enough to flow so that way. Which was great. I remember how I felt. Hot. I'd gotten the room tuned into me. My entrance was abrupt and shocking. But they'd come around. We were complicit. They relaxed. What I was doing. There's no place like being on stage. Pushes the envelope.