The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

1. It's our second dress rehearsal.
2. We have moved from our cramped basement rehearsal space at the Quaker Meeting House to the spacious, bright, airy, and day-lit upstairs meeting room.
3. We have a small audience of Michelle Hensley (again) and Michelle Woster (TTT Managing Director) — who has brought along four women friends. Also present are the meeting house caretaker and his daughter, who looks to be about four years old. Apart from the two Michelles, none of these people are theatre professionals, and, most importantly, nobody is carrying pens and legal pads. They're just here to see the play.

Larissa — who throughout the entire rehearsal period has been struggling valiantly against a nasty, persistent racking cough that has limited her to 2-3 hours of sleep a night — looks rested and, surprisingly, cheerful. She makes no attempt to take me aside and explain, eyes averted, that she has conferred with Michelle and Peter and that all agree a huge mistake has been made, and that one of the other Steves of the Minneapolis acting community — Yoakam, Pelinski, D'Ambrose, Lewis, or Sweere (fabulous actors all, btw) — will be going on with script in hand and perhaps it would be best if I gave back all my salary, packed my things quietly, and left by the back door.

Instead, Larissa spends the first two hours giving notes and going over particular scenes, tightening, adjusting, finessing with a sense of confidence and surety. The comments she has from Peter and Michelle all appear to be smart, observant, constructive, and effective.

Our audience arrives at 12:45, and at 1 p.m. we're off. Sonja and Marc (Eurydice and Orpheus) start the play and instantly the energy of the room changes to something we've never felt before. The change is the rapt attention of our tiny audience. They are riveted, engaged, enthralled. They laugh! Omigod, the play is funny! After three and a half weeks of rehearsal, we had kind of forgotten that. But even better, the laughter is coming from recognition and identification. They cry! The end of Eurydice carries a bittersweet melancholic mixture of empathy and loss that seems almost unbearable to witness. The play ends, and we stand to face the friends of Woster. Their mouths are creased with wide smiles and their eyes damp from tears. Yin and yang — marvelous!

Larissa and Michelle look relaxed and elated. Larissa has notes for us; there are always notes, but they're the notes a cast gets when the director feels the play is on the right track — more than that — that the play has tuned itself to the right pitch and is working, is playing the way it's meant to. Glitches are addressed, minor issues are discussed and solved, but the air is vibrating with the sense that the audience was compelled, moved, and we're onto something special here. Tomorrow we give the play it's first real audience: the VOA Women's Correctional Facility in Roseville. Ready or not, rehearsals are over.

Next: Opening Day