johm.rocks!

Hi everyone, It has been a minute or two.

I wanted to take some time out of my day to write about Not About Nightingales, the production process, and maybe try and have my final moments with it as a way of allowing myself to grieve a bit. As of me writing this, it is August 9th. I have just sent a ping to the officers about discussing what we end up doing next. In my heart I have this pit which tells me that we will likely not have a venue or anything for us to work with in order to make Nightingales happen.

For months I have felt felt like I’ve been in some dissociative state; most of my days in my mind blur together, and the only real moments where I have felt like I am actually thinking critically are when I am texting Storm lore about Bryce Typhoon, my Call of Cthulhu character, and when I am working on this show.

Where were we at? As of maybe a week or two ago, I have finished my first draft of blocking for the entire show. I was right in that the scene where they start chanting and singing in the prison dining room was 100% my favorite thing to block. I spent a few weeks studying dance choreography in order to make a very rudimentary choreographed scene while the chant was going on.

It probably wasn’t going to be very good, but I thought it was awesome in my head. Like 12 Angry Men, it probably would have been entirely different when we actually blocked it, but I think that’s part of the fun.

Initial rewrites to some of the romantic scenes between Jim and Eva were coming along…decently! I’m not one for scriptwriting, and so my initial attempt has been less at creating something new and more at modifying what was already there in order to make it feel slightly more natural.

My favorite part about Not About Nightingales was that the entire time I was working on it, I wasn’t very confident that it was going to be good. 12 Angry Men I felt very confident the entire time, as I had seen what it was based on so many times that I knew that the pieces worked correctly if I tried hard enough. I really liked the fear that I had for most of the process, as I really wasn’t sure if people were going to dig watching a 2 and a half hour prison thriller drama!

I haven’t really spoken about any of that much, as I feared that it would all be for nothing.

Where am I at? I’m not quite sure. It’s Monday, August 11th now. As I write this, we have officially shot that dog. Malcolm X would have been proud of me. I think leading up to today I had a lot of misplaced anger at the people around me, which I am ultimately not very proud of. I think this was an impossible scenario to beat. The more I looked at it, we were doomed from the start. I do not blame anyone around me for what has happened. Thank you all for trying.

I’m trying to take it well, can you tell? I’m trying to convince myself there is something for me to gain from this, something for me to learn.

The days leading up to this have been hectic and emotional; I feel like every day leading up to this I have either fought with someone or randomly started crying on the phone with a different person, and sometimes both with another! Being incredibly blunt, I realized now that my emotional state and self-worth were a little tied to theater and this organization. Not very healthy LOL! I think I have a lot of work to do on myself and how I handle things which make me upset. I’ve grown a habit of assuming the worst of the people around me and assuming people will do things to hurt me. I feel like I haven’t been the nicest person, and I’m sorry to those I have hurt.

Where do I go now? Definitely not sure; the org is planning to switch to funding and putting on one-act plays. Not the worst idea at all, and definitely all we can really do from this point anyways. I don’t really have any plans to go down that path; I don’t really see myself getting the same level of fulfillment from that, but all the respect to those here (like Aidan and Chris) who may do that. I am sure you will do great.

I’ve actually sent out a few applications for paid/volunteer positions at some theaters in town doing sound/set building work. I think my frail little hands are actually yearning for more manual labor! I’ve been considering actually writing and working on an audio drama as well; what started as an idea for a tabletop RPG campaign has now grown a bit. I think that would be fun. I think that would be challenging, and I would be bad at it, and that would be fun.

Ultimately I know that no matter what I do, I will eventually want to return to theater in some way. I tried to run from it, but it always returns. I’m sure someday soon I’ll be back there in the way that I desire.

Before I go, I wanted to share my favorite quote from Not About Nightingales. It’s something Jim says early on in the show, and it was the line that sold me on the emotional weight of this story.
“As long as a man can think as he pleases, he’s never exactly locked up anywhere. He can think himself outside of all their walls and boundaries and make the world his place to live in. It’s like being alone on top of a mountain at night with nothing around you but the stars. Only you’re not alone, cause you know that you’re part of everything living and everything living is part of you.”

I am not locked up, I am not alone. As long as I can think I know that I can find a new way forward.

Optimism will be my path. It may be unclear, but the light will show itself soon.

I will find a way.

1. John/Joan