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Love Person is in those early, jerky, blocking stages, and I needed to get away. So after spending yesterday morning fixing and tweaking and nodding a whole lot about I'm not sure what (Oh, I fixed that scene that wasn't working. Dramaturgs rock! Yes, I'm talking about you, Liz Engleman!) I ran over to Heart of the Beast to check in on their rehearsal.

The script for Beneath the Surface at HOBT is virtually done. They're only a couple of weeks from opening. If I start making changes now I'll probably be attacked by a puppet, or possibly a clown.

I love this show; it's a circus about water. See, doesn't that sound like not enough material? But Sandy, the director, gets going on the subject, and you know that she's exercising some serious restraint in keeping the show to an hour. It's my second time working with HOBT; a couple of years ago I collaborated with Andrew Kim and Masanari Kawahara to create Gotama, a gorgeous piece about the early life of the Buddha. This time Sandy Spieler is the guiding force of the project.

What I love about this work is that it really is not all about my script. It's not even primarily about my script. In traditional theater, the script is a fairly sacred thing — no one changes a word of Love Person without my explicit approval — but puppeteers don't work that way. I may have a symphony of words in my head — hell, I may even have committed them to paper — but those puppeteers have their own symphony going; and it's visual, and magical, and comical, and something that I could never have come up with in all my word-smithing. The process here becomes about creating, inter-weaving, adapting, building on what I see happening on stage. The scripts I create for HOBT are skeletal compared to the actual show, because there is no way to describe the mad visual feast going on wherever you look. I resort to phrases like 'funny bit' and 'gorgeous imagery' and move on with my dialogue made of words, words, words.

I caught 2 circus acts before rehearsal ended, and maybe 50 percent of the words I wrote were spoken in anything resembling the right order, which actually isn't bad with two weeks to go and ladders and puppets and costume changes. And man, were they funny! No wait, this is what I actually love about puppeteers! I may have written the script, I may know exactly where they're headed, but their minds just work differently from most people, and they take me by surprise and crack me up every time! It's nice to be surrounded by creative voices just as loud as your own, intent on finding some way to harmonize.

Palate cleansed, I went back to Mixed Blood this morning, to where my script is sacred, approved a bunch of changes (not so sacred after all), and watched a couple of scenes to discover that even with scripts in hand, tripping over set cushions, the play is working. It's a different kind of harmony, one intent on following the score I have set down. It's labor intensive in a different way, and just as gorgeous.

I think this is why I chose theater, it's as varied as the people who choose to practice it. And it is not a lonely artform.