Two Weeks

I just need to get through the next two weeks. Then I have a vacation. A blessed whole week off from work, in which I will go to the beach, turn 26, possibly go to NYC, and take care of all of the life-managing that I’ll be neglecting over the next two weeks.

In the beginning of June, I auditioned for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which opens on August 9, a week from Thursday. The auditions were fun, I liked the director, and I hoped to get cast. After my last callback, I went about with anxiety bubbling in my stomach as I waited to hear what part I’d get. As more time went by and I still hadn’t heard anything, though, I started to look forward to having my summer free. Not getting cast meant no rehearsals and therefore more time for relaxing with my boyfriend, dinner with the parents, and traveling to see far-away friends.

I think I’d all-but-convinced myself that I didn’t want to be in the show when I was notified that I’d been cast as Tom Snout, one of the Mechanicals. Fine, I thought. That’ll be fun.

And it has been. But now, with two weeks of rehearsals left before we open for our four free performances, I really, really wish I'd had that free summer instead. If I had been aware of how much would be going on at work, too, I may not even have auditioned. I don’t want to feel this worried about getting everything done, about not neglecting my loved ones while I embark on 14 days of non-stop activity and obligation and have-to-dos.

Plus – the performance space sucks. Everyone knows it. And really, the sole reason that it sucks is that it’s the end of July and there’s no air conditioning in the building. We’re performing in a converted gymnasium in a government-owned building, and I don’t care that there’s a basketball hoop hanging over the top of the set, or that the space is so huge that the actors’ shouts reverberate before being swallowed. I don’t even care that barbed wire snakes ominously around the perimeter of the grounds.

But the no air conditioning thing? Wow does that suck. And it’s not like when you were a kid, and there was no air conditioning and so your parents just opened all the windows for circulation and it was bearable. The heat in the gym is an oppressive, sticky, stuffy heat, the kind that makes all the actors and crew pretty sluggish and half-dead about 40 minutes into rehearsal. This is the kind of heat that produces indecent sweat, potential swooning and excessive crankiness. It’s like someone grabbed a tank-full of hot, muggy swamp air and released it into the building, shut the doors, left it to fester, then opened the doors two years later and said “Welcome, theatre group! Welcome to hell!”

For the past 13 years, this theatre company has offered Free Shakespeare in the park, where even if it was hot and muggy, at least there was a sky above you. If it’s outdoors in the summer, you expect it to be hot. And even then, the sun goes down and you get that wonderful, velvet summer night air. In the current space, when the sun goes down, you just get to go outside and wonder how in the hell you’re going to force yourself back onto the sauna-stage.

So. I’m just willing myself to keep going through these next couple of weeks, and then I get a break. In two weeks, my stories for work will be written, my proofing of a tedious reunion newsletter for work will be done, my volunteer editing for a really, really badly written book will be further along, and I’ll have endured the hot, sweaty rehearsals and performances of Midsummer.

Vacation vacation vacation vacation…