Second Weekend....

...of The Birds and all is well :-)  We actually had a Wednesday matinee this week (11:00 -- oy!) and a talkback after, which was totally delightful.  Very savvy kids in the audience, high school students studying film and concentrating right now on Alfred Hitchcock, so they had terrific questions and thoughts about the play, which is so different from the movie.  I think they were all surprised by it and I'm sure they were wondering how we were going to deal with live birds, which, of course, there are none (kids and animals ;-)  A very astute woman -- a teacher? -- said that the play made her think of A Streetcar Named Desire. I could feel all of our epiphany light bulbs on stage light up!  A fantastic observation and a really interesting comparison.  Had some fab friends come on Thursday night and it was great to catch up with them over a glass of wine at the swanky Deerpath Inn.  

We're finding new things each performance.  Thankfully, none of us feels that anything is set in stone, so it leaves us much room to explore and discover new things and so we have fun each night because it's a brand-new experience.  Add the very different audiences' energy for each performance and how can we go wrong?

On other fronts, I did a wonderful reading at Chicago Dramatists yesterday of a funny, quirky, smart, whimsically feministic (yep, I'm making that word up) play by the amazing Trina Kakacek, directed by the always sublime Anna Bahow, and I got to work with divine actors that I've never worked with before:  Ella Raymont, Meghan Reardon, and Zach Livingston.  We had so much fun rehearsing it and the reading was a ton of fun yesterday.  I have another reading coming up this week of a Steve Peterson play that was the last play that I did directed by the much-missed Russ Tutterow.  It'll be fun to revisit that.  Steve's such a nice guy and a marvelous writer.

Oh, and let us not forget THE CUBS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  WOO-HOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

Below is the breathtaking bouquet my BFF in St. Louis sent for opening night.   Don't it purty? (Okay, who remembers Justin Wilson, the Cajun cook? :-)