Journal, 1/2: Jane the Plain complete

LEESON: And what I think is, and this is the great secret: I think that happens all the time. Every day, the glowing girl against the mirror-man, every night, beauty and death, every hour the world almost ending, then going on instead. But you can’t live like that, right? Well, maybe you can in high school, until you grow up and learn how not to see.

I finished Jane the Plain yesterday, and completed a very preliminary edit today. The play ended up reaching for far more than I expected – at first, I had thought the play would be a bit of a lark, a fun and most-likely ill-fated experiment.

Well, it is certainly an experiment, and stylistically, it’s an enormous challenge for a director. I know it can work after staging the scenes for Purple Rep’s Dark Night Serials Series, but I think a lot of folks reading it won’t have any idea how it plays.

That said, the play has come to mean a lot more to me than I thought it would, and so I’m very excited to hear it read tomorrow with Alisha Spielmann, Jennifer Somers Kipley, Becky Kelly Friedenberg, Chinaza uche, Don Whitmore and Matthew Murumba, all of whom have been instrumental in developing it. If you’d like to join us at 6pm at the Players Club for the reading, leave a comment below with your email and I’ll send you the details.