theatre@dartmouth, part II

As soon as I saw the rehearsal schedule I was baffled. I copied the times from the stage manager's blitz into my calendar, thrilled and wondering if I'd have time to finish my homework, to go to movies, to see friends, and again thrilled. Rehearsals started off slowly, the director easing us into our roles, into the script, making sure we understood Anoulih's work before we put it on its feet. It was difficult, at first, falling into the pattern of spending the hours between seven and ten at night in the Bentley Theatre -- I soon discovered the strategy of sleeping through the afternoons, eating and working at night after rehearsal, going to bed at two and beginning the thing over again.

By the third week, with the schedule becoming ever-more demanding, I began to delete events from my calendar. The actor's cliche "Sorry, I have rehearsal," as a response to any invitation became a standard phrase in my vocabulary. Dinner was a PB&J sandwich eaten partially before rehearsals and finished during the five-minute break at the halfway point. I stayed in the 1902 Room (the only space in Baker-Berry Library that's open 24 hours other than Novak Cafe) after the rest of the library closed, starting papers that were due the next day at three in the morning, putting off Linguistics homework for lunch the next day, finally biking home through the thin, lighted darkness between two and four, awake and exhausted in a world asleep.

My friends, of course, were wonderful. They took to calling me 'Tig', short for Antigone, brought me meals, studied by my side or provided me with wonderful reasons not to. I was utterly overwhelmed at times, the reality of the play seeping slowly into the reality of my life, and some nights, I'd be unable to have conversations without performing them as I would lines, treating the other person as an actor, someone playing someone else. I played, too -- I took long walks in the middle of the night, decided to be a character from literature for a week, slip quotes from the play into conversations before overacting them and bursting into giggles. I discovered parts of myself that only Anoulih could've led me to confront; I worked to break down all the barriers that might keep me from being completely honest -- as wholly myself and as an actor. In place of movies, dinners, parties, hangouts, I gained an invaluable understanding of myself that I believe would've taken much longer -- if it happened at all -- if not for Antigone.