A long rehearsal and a pottle of malmsey

Here is a pottle of Malmsey.
Good and strong,
It will rejoice both heart and tongue.
Though Noah thinks us never so long,
Yet we will drink alike.
-- Noah's wife



This week's rehearsal was long and hard.

It was good work but it was tedious.

I was feeling more and more overwhelmed by the fact that this was the last rehearsal before dress rehearsal and we were just adding the finaly blocking.

We had begun working with some props and someone decided that we needed another empty wine bottle for the servant's tray. I was sitting onstage beside Jeri during a break from rehearsing the opening scene when this conversation began and Melinda was directly in front of us. I said: "We're planning to empty a bottle of wine later tonight, we can bring that one." Melinda said: "Really?" I said: "Yes, Want to Join Us?" She said: "Yes!"

That was just one little quiet aside in an evening full of details and direction. Lori Anne, who had coached and encouraged from the side aisle last week, came to the center aisle tonight and followed the script to prompt us for our lines. She would prompt us but also encourage us, trying to assure us that we were very close to knowing our lines. I was struck by two things. It was a side of her I hadn't seen. And, also, there was an earnest humility in her willingness to sit with the script and prompt us.

As the evening progressed and ill-defined tensions rose, Melinda walked up to me at one point, leaned in and said: Were you serious about that wine?

So Jeri and Melinda and I headed to commuter housing after rehearsal and drank wine and talked about he play and talked about seminary and we even talked about real life. Melinda has been doing a great job as director, but it was wonderful to get to just be with her as a friend. All of us have more hectic schedules this semester than last year when we all lived together in commuter housing and were slogging through Christian Tradition together. It was nice to get to just relax a bit and enjoy one another's company and laughter.

During World Religions in Dialogue the next day, I blocked God's final speech myself, drawing the final scene on a note card and writing lines in at each stop. We had blocked this scene in general the night before, but the movements hadn't seemed to match the words, and the rehearsal was too busy for anyone, really, to pay attention to that level of detail.