08/13/2019
It's been a year now since we dared to bring Mr. and Mrs. Blake alive on stage, complete with new musical settings of some of Blake's inimitable poems. What an adventure, and what a daring cast! I promised I was going to write a play about the process of making the play, and I meant it, because so many hilarious and amazing things happened: from the moment a wild-haired surfer dude walked in and OWNED the role of LEIF, to the series of calamities that seemed to attend the casting of the role of CATHERINE BLAKE! Ok, yes, maybe it was a bad idea to let my 7 year old bike circles around one candidate while she auditioned in the studio, and maybe it was a bad idea after all to hold our dress rehearsal in a space recently used for a three day ceremony. Everyone said that would be like throwing a match into a powder keg, and they were right! In the end, the amazing Alysson Hall, who had been cast as JEN, was able to miraculously play both roles, and knew all the lines (!), and it turned out to make so much SENSE, as she became the one actor embodying the transition from circa 1800 to circa 2000. I'm still amazed at the way we managed to have three couples from three time periods on stage at the same time, but we were right to trust in the intelligence and imaginativeness of our audiences. In the end, the people in the play, and their interactions, were easily as strange and awesome and fascinating as the characters in the play... as was my own sense of witnessing something I "wrote" take on a collaborative life of its own... so I probably SHOULD write that play about the making of the play... but until I do, suffice it to say that "If a thing loves it is infinite"....
