Resisting resistance is futile

G = RIm²

Perhaps the one word I’ll always retain from high school chemistry is “entropy.”  I can remember, quite vividly, my junior year teacher (who, fittingly, looked so much like Albert Einstein that he had a picture of the famed German genius on all his bathroom passes), telling my class that all living things tend toward chaos, that we live in order NOT to die.  Not to be grim, but that’s why dead pigeons, wilted flowers, and corpses all look the way they do.  Chaos is natural. Order is, ironically, rather antiestablishment. 

Living is a lot of work.  It takes a lot of work.

I can’t help but think about our own lives.  We have jobs -- some of us working forty (+) hours a week.  Most of us don't do it because we like it; we do it to make money, to live.  

Then why do we make art? At the end of the day, after working a job we hate, after standing elbow-to-elbow on a sweaty [insert # or letter] train, after throwing ourselves on the couch, exhausted, defiantly vowing to actually get to bed before one that night -- to get enough sleep that we won't have to upgrade to the extra-large coffee in the morning -- why do we bother?

Why write that story? Why take that voice lesson? Why break out the acrylics? Why trek to a rehearsal to play pretend in a humid dance studio for four hours?

Again, I would argue, we do it to live.

But in a completely different sense of the word.  

On Thursday night, Olivia read to the cast an excerpt from her book, A Director Prepares, by Anne Bogart, which discusses the importance of resistance to the creative process. The reason, the book argued, making art (or in this case, theatre) is so difficult, yet so rewarding is because creation is the opposite of entropy, which, if you’ve checked the olfactory status of the pizza box you forgot to throw out last week, is the natural way of things. 

Poster's up at FringeCENTRAL!

In that vein, our show tends towards entropy: it's just a series of words on a page, notes on a staff, a piece of fabric, a golf club. But it's our resistance to these realities that gives birth to Grimm. The words on the page belong to Hansel, as he tells his sister one day she’ll make a wonderful queen. The notes on the staff weave together to create beautiful four-part harmonies. The piece of fabric is actually a golden cloak spun from straw. The golf club is a horse.

Again, throughout this whole process, I find the efforts of this cast and creative team absolutely inspiring. Nonetheless, it’s crunch time for this production: ticket orders and comp requests are coming in (we were even named a best-selling show by broadwayworld.com!), the posters are up, our set load-in at HERE is Monday, our tech rehearsal is Tuesday.  

Ladies and gentleGrimm, we open in one week.

We have all the pieces. The challenge over the next few days will be putting them together. But as Olivia said the other night, we call ourselves BIG because, at the end of the day, it’s about believing in this process. Now, I don't mean to quote Journey (and by extension, every drunk college girl at a bar), but don't stop believing. We haven’t.