Glutbusters

September 21, 2005

It's The Little Things You Do Together

Being in a play, a good one, anyway, with a good cast, is like falling in love.

In the early rehearsals, you're all getting to know each other. Did he really laugh at that? Does she always wear those clothes? Could there really be another person that into Stevie Wonder? All you know at that stage is that these people love the same thing you do - the rest is a mystery. But all it takes is one significant shared experience, say, a rehearsal weekend at a beach house, and that curious attraction turns into full-blown, first-day-of-spring, dancing-hand-in-hand-through-a-field-of-daisies romance.

That's where I'm at now. I am HOT for my cast. I've had play crushes before, but this is a play crush on fifteen people. All I want to do is spend time with them. And then when I do, all I want to do is nothing - laugh, talk shit, sing songs. When I'm on my own, I idly wonder what they would think of my CDs, my clothes, the fact that I stink of petrol because my Kombi is trying to kill me slowly with fume inhalation. We have our own little private jokes, shared stories, facial expressions. I am besotted with them, all of them. Besotted with the group, with the feeling that is only there when we are. God, I feel unfaithful to The Redhead just thinking about them.

It's this feeling that keeps me coming back to plays and musicals. Sure, I love the performing, but the magic of a group of people being thrown together to create something (hopefully) great is something that I've never felt anywhere else. "Fun" isn't the word, though it's the one I use most often to describe it. But the short answer is that you don't know what it's like until you've tried it. And once I did, I couldn't get enough of it.

But ours is an impossible love. At the end of October we'll finish the last of our five shows (five shows? All that work for five shows?) and that'll be it. Some of us will keep in contact, some of us won't. And even if, by some unprecedented miracle of post-show relations, we all regularly get together, it won't be the same. The thing that binds us together so strongly is only fleeting. But, like a love lost, it'll always be with us.

Filed under Peter