REHEARSAL JOURNAL #2

We are into our second week of rehearsal. The work is intense and the company is responding to this ambitious season. We are confronting the many unanswerable questions that these five plays raise. I agree with David Mamet when he says that the playwright’s highest calling is to wrestle the unanswerable. Help us see it, give us an opportunity to sit in a room together and bear it. Craft something beautiful out of our human mess. The 2010 Repertory meets these challenges…fearlessly. I am proud of the work that we are doing. Our playwrights, directors, designers and actors are not turning away from the world that we live in. These plays burn with intensity and truth. This work reminds us that theater has the power to change us.

Storytelling is thriving at the Contemporary American Theater Festival. We live in a turbulent and dangerous world. We face an uncertain future…yet the theater offers us a public space to come together in a community to ask difficult questions by engaging us and entertaining us with new stories. The CATF rehearsal spaces are buzzing with creative energy. I can hear the EELWAX JESUS Band belting out the music below my office. The shops are working late into the evening preparing the costumes, props and scenery. And there is a constant hum of human emotion and activity coming from the artists residences. The Festival is in high gear. The work has begun.