There’s always a moment when it starts to feel real. Maybe it’s the first rehearsal where you’re not holding a script, or the first time you’re in costume. For Stonefish, there were two of those moments; one of them involved my co-producer Eric standing at the edge of the stage and looking at the upright piano about twenty feet away and musing, “I wonder how we’re gonna get that up here.” (There’s almost nothing more real than a piano that has to move in a vertical direction.) The other, more striking moment was when Rebecca, the stage manager, turned to me during the set build and said, “You wrote a thing, so we built a house.”
Now that I think about it, that’s kind of what theater is when you’re a playwright: you write a thing, and the people around you build you a house, made of the time and the effort and the dedication that goes into the words and the characters, and the people who make sure that those words can be heard and those characters can be seen. Little things, hundreds of them, all provided by an awful lot of people giving an awful lot of time. All for a play that no one’s ever seen before. That’s huge.
I started writing Stonefish almost seven years ago, and as I write this, it goes up in eight days. I’m excited. I’m anxious. I’m thrilled. And, to put it baldly, I want you to see it. I want you to come to the house that these amazing people built. I want you to see the work that Amanda, Matt, Ren, and Sean have done finding these characters that I know so well, and the way David shaped the story around and among them and made it look effortless.
I want you to find out if we actually got the damn piano onstage.