Eli Dupree

What is there to say? We did it. You know when you have read/experienced something poetic, and good, and you have nothing to say, because making words about it would just demean it? I mean, I suppose you can talk around it, mention little details that you liked, but the substance is beyond your reach. Or one could say in this case that it's because the process was a journey towards understanding, and that now that it's over, I'm momentarily satiated with understanding, so that a reflection, which is further journeying, is... trivial?
I was surprised at how discrete the stages the class went through were – a block of flailing around, writing stuff, finding stuff – then a block of putting it together, sorting, transitions – then a block of rehearsal and tuning. Not a lot of mixture between them. Something like... an idealized streamlined creative process? Sure, we may not have seemed streamlined at the time, but this is how the creative process always is: Pulling ideas from everywhere, ending up with a core, fitting them together around that core, and refining it. There was surprisingly little reworking of anything that had been fit together. The pieces – with just a little finagling – fell right together. How – luck? Well, luck happens. Small-scale luck of what stories and information we brought, and large-scale luck of the ensemble's members meshing well.
Okay, I know I learned something from this process, but I have no freakin' idea what. That's not a bad thing – it's that whatever I've learned, I've internalized so much by now that I don't remember what it was like not having it, and I think it's too soon (or, in another sense, too late) to go back and hash out what the exact effects were. I just know that I feel different about acting, directing, playwriting. That's how it works.
Last week in particular was so much different from the rest of the class time – working with performance instead of writing, I guess. The first time I've felt completely comfortable coming and working on theatrical stuff on demand, though. Why? Purpose. Not "I am doing this because that is what you do in this class" but "I am doing this because it's integral to our show", hence real motivation, hence all mundane resistance vanishing. That's how it works.
I have no idea how much I'll be involved in theatre in the future. As I've told several people – where I go to college, the people in theatre may not be the ones holding the magic. Here, they are.
And there's all different sorts of magic. Part of the learning experience here was to see what other people could bring. The most noticeable one for me was [name omitted]'s; she takes her a long time to get her magic in gear, so to speak, but then she can do things I don't understand. Her car scene is one of my favorite scenes because I still don't understand how it works. You know the idea of studying under a bunch of different masters, not because some of them are more masterful or better teachers than others, but simply because they're different and you can learn different things from them? Well, they don't need to be masters for you to study from them, either; they just have to have something, anything, that you don't. That's part of what an ensemble's for.