Tonight's rehearsal included training with Fight Director Kaitee Tredway. There are moments in Turtles when things get a little violent. For the safety of the actors, a fight director is brought in to show them the proper and realistic way to depict violence on stage. 

A simple slap between Bella and El Diablo could get either one of them injured if Jackie connected too hard on Nicole's face, or if Jackie pulled too hard on Elle's arm during an emotional moment. Check your spacing, lock eyes, sell the slap. These are a few of the things Kaitee put in the actors' mind, along with their lines, blocking, and backstories. 

(Translation)

A polar bear grows its thick coat to keep warm. Grows sharp claws to be the supreme killer where food is scarce, where being a supreme killer is the difference between life and death. The polar bear has adapted. We are a species capable of destroying ourselves. There is a reason we have developed emotions such empathy, kindness, and hope. We developed them out of survival. If we hadn’t, we probably would have destroyed ourselves long ago. Can you imagine a polar bear feeling remorse for killing a seal? And while you are not perfect, you love and care for your children –you love another human being. I maintain, through your actions, there is a very good chance that you are further along the evolutionary scale. You might very well represent a higher form of the species, while others will go the way of the dodo. That is what it means to be human.

First costume fittings. Shooting against the green screen. Lighting choices. Turtles is an extraordinary tech-heavy show. It is intentionally so. It is meant to challenge every theater artist who works on it. (And hopefully it will challenge audience members, too.) And I don't think there hasn't been an artist who hasn't at one point looked at me and said, in a voice dripping with sarcasm about a particularly sticky moment, Thanks a lot, John. 

This morning, right before awakening, I dreamt I was in The Factory Theater watching a production of a Shakespeare play. I don't know which play it was, but suddenly I stood up and I threw an egg at the stage and it hit a piece of the scenery, upstage center. The thing was, it was just the eggshell, an empty egg. Still, the actors stopped for a beat, some of the audience members turned around and quizzically looked in my direction, and I explained to a woman sitting next to me, who I seemed to know but didn't know, that it was an empty eggshell, no big deal. But while I was explaining this to the woman, someone--I don't know if it was a man or a woman--just behind me stood up in the dark and threw a real egg at the stage. 

When I co-founded Boston Public Works Theater Company, and then chose Turtles to be the play that I would produce, I know there was a part of me that wanted to shake up the Boston theater scene, but only in an empty egg kind of way. I certainly don't think the traditional, mainstream theater should be abolished (proscenium stages and fourth walls separating the audience and the actors, people quietly sitting in rows, $8 glasses of crap Chardonnay) but I did think that there was a whole lot of room for a different kind of theater event in Boston. 

But the more I sit in the rehearsal room, the more I act as artistic director and producer of my show, the more I sit up nights when I can't sleep and read Richard Schechner's book, Environmental Theater, evilly slipped to me by director, collaborator, and partner-in-crime Jeff Mosser, and now this morning's dream, the more I realize my alter ego was the person in the dark, throwing an egg at Shakespeare. 

Boston Public Works is more than just playwrights producing their own work. It is a radical departure from the way things have always been done in the traditional theater, starting with the playwright acting as the artistic director. Just like environmental theater strips away the barriers between the audience and the performers, the playwright as artistic director pushes away any real or implied loss of voice playwrights might have had in the traditional theater model, and gives authority to an artist that in the last part of the 20th century at least, was relegated to a very small role during the production process. It takes an incredible amount of trust for theater artists to shift to this model, and I can honestly say I don't know if it would work for everyone, including other playwrights. The older I get (and just yesterday was my birthday as a reminder that I am getting older) the more I see that horses will run back into burning barns, and people will return to situations that aren't working simply because it's all they know, and it's what makes them feel safe. 

Me, acting as an artistic director under the umbrella of Boston Public Works, shows what a theater might look like if I ran a theater, and it's not necessarily what a theater would look like with any of the other BPW playwrights as the artistic directors. But this time, let's say there's a theater named, oh, I don't know, Alley Cat Theater, named after my two daughters, Allison and Kathryn. The theater would do just new work by Boston playwrights. It would employ only Boston theater artists, of all ethnicities, genders, and ages, who are devoted to new work. We would work collaboratively, but with loose boundaries between our areas of expertise. I wouldn't tell a director how to direct or an actor how to act, for example, but we would all listen to each others' responses to the work and our art. The work would be challenging, for the artists and the audience. I realize how demanding Turtles is to put onstage, and also a departure from plays normally staged starting with its subject matter. After writing it and seeing it getting up on its feet, I feel like Vincent Van Gogh painting peasants or Toulouse-Lautrec painting prostitutes, while all the other painters are painting the bourgeoisie. 

Putting a playwright in the role of artistic director may seem like a small point or an insignificant change. It's not even a new idea. Young Jean Lee started her theater in New York to have control over her work. But it's a huge change, comparable to moving a decimal point one place in a number. Or the difference between an empty eggshell, or one with the yoke still inside. 

We open in a little over three weeks. Starting yesterday, the cast is off-book, which means they are supposed to have their lines memorized. Watching a cast during the first couple of day of being off book though, relinquishing the security of a script in hand, is like watching a newborn deer or giraffe--any long-legged animal just born--struggle to its feet. They're gawky and clumsy. But actors plow ahead, reacting to moments and instincts, and you do suddenly start to see some serious strides in acting. 

It was also my birthday today, and I was running late to rehearsal, crossing against the lights, racing down Boylston Street, getting stuck behind students strolling along with their noses to their phones (just move it already, would you?) and I came tearing into the rehearsal room with the cast standing around a table with all of our usual junk food, plus some really tasty cupcakes (Key Lime, yeah!) and some original turtles. Plus I got a rendition of Happy Birthday that I think spanned the entire American music canon. 

The Turtles' design team had a production meeting last night at my apartment, which coincidentally is also the official headquarters of Boston Public Works Theater Company, and because of the meeting I didn't sleep a wink last night. 

And not because it was a bad meeting. It was quite the opposite. It was a wonderfully productive meeting in which we figured out where we stood in putting together this incredibly tech-heavy play, and what we need to do between now and our production run next week, which is a rehearsal when the designers and the actors all get together and walk through the play. The actors will play their characters and the sound designer (Allyssa Jones) will be cueing the sound for that moment (road noises, thunder, a door opening) and the lighting designer (Barbara Craig) will be projecting images onto the set. This is also the time when our stage manager, Jadira Figueroa will start working with the cues so when tech week comes she'll already have a good feel for running the show. 

When I acted, what happened to me last night would happen to me all of the time. Suddenly, this thing, this being, this creature, this force would take over and fill up my body, completely out of my control. I just had to lie there and sweat it out. Today, despite not having slept, my mind feels alert and sharp. It's all part of the creative process.

After the meeting Jeff, the director, and Amy, the production manager, stayed behind for a beer, and I commented to Jeff that things are going very well. He replied, As they should.