“Hi, guys!”
It could have been any other virtual meeting, any other day. We all know those, right? Check your cameras, hit the link, grumble at forgetting to turn on the microphone again.
But here in Chez Rochat, Monday evenings aren’t just any virtual meeting. They’re a chance to get some real insanity back again, of the best kind.
Mondays are when we take the stage.
***
“You went into production without a screenplay?”
“I thought I HAD a screenplay! I’ve been working on it for three years!”
— Ron Hutchinson, “Moonlight and Magnolias”
Some of you may remember that back in February, I went over to the dark side. Dramatically speaking, anyway. This long-time actor became the new assistant director of “Moonlight and Magnolias,” getting a ringside seat to the screwball madness. And madness is exactly what you get when three characters are trying to bang out the script to “Gone With The Wind” in five days, with a faithful secretary guarding the door.
It’s a story with everything. High-speed dialogue. Studio gossip. And WAY too many peanuts and bananas for one’s sanity. It couldn’t miss.
And then, midway through rehearsals, COVID-19 arrived. And our can’t-miss comedy suddenly found itself without a chance to pull the trigger.
***
“I need this, guys. I need it. You have no idea how badly I need it.”
– Ron Hutchinson, “Moonlight and Magnolias”
The virus closed the stages. Unsurprising, really. When mass gatherings can spread a disease, crowding into a darkened room with strangers for two hours or so is the last thing any health department would advise. We had reached Shakespearean heights: closed by the plagues.
But like the hero of “The Princess Bride,” we were only mostly dead.
Moon Theatre didn’t cancel “Moonlight.” It put it on hold. The Rialto gave us new performance dates in the fall, hoping that by then, they’d have found a way to safely reopen.
Our show had survived, but our weeks-long rehearsal process had become months-long – with no way to rehearse physically.
That’s where the magic of Mondays began, turning rehearsals into a new “virtual meeting.” Hop online. Work the lines. Work the characters. Keep the story alive, the feeling alive, the company together. Keep the show breathing, waiting for its chance to once again come out in the open.
I wonder what Shakespeare’s bandwidth was like?
***
“So what do we want our specks of light to be? This time? When we’re sitting in a movie palace and the lights go down …and the theatre disappears and the magic starts to happen?”
– Ron Hutchinson, “Moonlight and Magnolias”
There’s an irony here. Our show is about three men locked in a room with limited supplies, asked to do the seemingly impossible, with anxiety growing at every turn. The temptation is huge to just quit. But if they do, everything falls apart.
We’re living that. Every single day.
And it’s the same kind of single-minded focus that will get us all through this together.
We all want normal. We all want a world where isolation isn’t a need, where we can visit friends, browse a library, stop by a baseball field that has people on it. Maybe even go to a theatre now and then, heaven forbid.
But to get to “normal,” we have to pass through “safe.” It’s hard. Especially since viruses aren’t kind enough to set deadlines, letting us know how long we have to be careful. It’s like walking blind through a room where the floor’s been covered in thumbtacks and Legos … slow, careful steps trying to feel a path through, with no certainty of how far we have left to go.
If we stay focused, if we help each other, if we find ways to adapt and support and comfort and care, we’ll make it. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But we will see the door unlock, taking as many of us through it as we can.
And when that door opens, even the most ordinary things in the world will seem pretty magical.
Maybe even as magical as a Monday.