acting is fun

Have enjoyed realizing what discoveries can come from making small observations these last few rehearsals. When directing, once things are sort of up and staged, you're looking to fix and make better based on what you see not working as a part of the big picture, then you have to work with the actor to hopefully find something they can adjust in what they're doing internally that will read externally the way you want it to. I feel like Katie and I have been able to communicate really well/ she's really been able to help me a lot at this stage, looking for these minute inner work adjustments to make. They seem like really silly little things, but what I'm working on or having trouble with now are issues of like where my gaze is falling, how if I pick a point really far away one day, like yesterday, the quality of my concentration gets a lot fuzzier. And does that mean I'm too much in the world/ gaze not soft enough, or is that just something to be aware of, control for in performance. Or it will be a gloomy, rainy day, and suddenly the piece will feel all drowsy (ps-Katie, I realized the drowsiness might also be a result of listening to it every night before I go to sleep. Oh well. Too late. Now I'm addicted.) It's great to be able to let it be a little bit different every time I do it, sometimes as a choice, sometimes just letting different environmental/emotional factors present that day creep in and color it. And not needing to have like an intellectual justification for each choice, or whim. Letting Katie read the stuff that comes out of me, discussing together the implications of various possible choices that present themselves and agreeing about which directions we're comfortable exploring in, from a dramaturgical point of view. Then I just sort of have to trust Katie as we go back and forth, chasing down and refining the good, letting the bad fall away, speculating together about whether I might be able to keep my eyes open for longer in strong light if I didn't spend so much time reading in the dark. But I think this is helping me develop a better sense of what the ideal actor-director conversation/relationship ought to be. While I've always felt it was nice to pause occasionally, however far along in the process, to ask the actor "How was that for you?" sometimes it's perfunctory.. or even a placeholder for the brilliant note you've yet to articulate for yourself. It's been helpful to spend some time thinking about what's really most helpful for the actor to hear back after they finish sharing, pouring out this unfiltered stream of impressions and physical sensations. If the director can really engage the actor on that level, as Katie's been so great about doing with me, just climb into their head, their body, a little bit, talk with them on that level about the actor's immediate reality, which is a sensory one at this point, and the actor's able to talk about it also, that's the way they're going to be of most use to one another.