Time quite swift and made slow. Viewed as Greek myth for a moment.

Time plays tricks with me. I have been impatient as long as I can remember. I’ve been made to wait, wanted to see the results of tests, and the ranking of evaluations of all sorts more times than I can remember. Often, I found myself waiting early to be met. This is because I always try to be early if a date is set at at 3:30 for example, I start looking up and down the street at around 3:12….and the minutes it takes for the person who easily well may be on time, seems to me to be a long, long, long time. One of the times I fell in love, it seemed an eternity till I could see her again. So I start here by saying time seems to be painful and fairly marked as slow.

The powerful Greek image suggesting opposites poles is when one is between Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla, a sharp-toothed multi-headed monster; and Charybdis, the mouth of a whirlpool waiting to draw down all who would pass too closely to it ( while trying to avoid Scylla.) My sense is that time can be found in the middle of this myth. It wildly fluctuates between painfully slow and astonishingly quick. These opposites are not based in clock time, of course. Two measures of time could be composed of the same 36 hours, say, and they seem alike when viewing literal seconds or hours. When do I control time, and when am I being controlled by having lost all sense of it? I’m impatient in the expressing this quandary because of it’s very generality. Impatient with my own impatience. To be clear, both ends of the contrast are horrible, eat us for lunch, are both elements of time to be avoided. Fast or slow. Editing or rehearsing.

I had a lovely gig a few years back to edit a video piece based upon the WW II “Liberty Ship” the Jeremiah O’Brien (The finished video was to be a promotional piece to introduce visitors to the ship as berthed today in the San Francisco Bay). I shot footage on the deck, up high in the rigging, down in the engine room, and in the captain’s bridge. Add to these I had historical footage available to me of various “Rosie the Riveters” who were the ones who built the “Liberty Ships” during the war. I also had views of her sister ships as they were launched and wended their way across the Pacific theater of war. I had less dramatic footage of supplies being loaded, and finished film from “U.S. Newsreels of the World” that aired in movie theaters all across America during the war. My priority was to define the role such ships and female work- forces had during the Pacific War. I was following a script and narration which held my documentary together, but also following advice given camera men everywhere. I shot more “footage” than could possibly be used. The cutting and amount of space given each shot were carefully composed. I am merely describing a specific instance of what happens in general while editing film. The goal was 10 minutes (or so) of the “picture” as parts of the ship were pretty much equal in importance. But I was amazed when I looked up at a clock to realize how quickly it had galloped along. A simple 30 seconds for my video’s opening, took the first 4 hours in the editing booth. Decisions were made on the fly, with real time elapsing for each capture of views of the ship. I returned to editing suites approximately 8 times for 4 hours each time, before I had the 10 minutes completed or “in the can.”

So time happens in reality, but it also can be compressed by focussed attention or multiple points of view. I had returned to a ship 50 years after it’s original sailiing, and it now serves as a floating museum. Time flies again while I was trying to capture it’s passage in an editing mode. I’ve of course modified this description, editing these words on the page, and once again time has flown. My life is filled with spoonfuls or moments of reality, but more often it has been via rehearsals, leading to live productions, as my life has been spent in theatre not in television or film.

It is said that life is not a rehearsal, or that this short life is all the time we have been given. My life, as a theatre director, however, has often been measured and I remember not in aspects of life, but rather as the rehearsals I planned or guided. My memory of them are in slow-motion: time is frozen. I have always felt that the productions I directed were far more important to me in their rehearsals than they ever were as finished products. Rehearsals follow a common pattern from casting to exploring to repeating to polishing. They typically take place over a period of time in which my life is been centered upon a specific play. Unlike the example I’ve given to do with film which only shows the audience exactly what it is designed to see, the stage play changes fluidly into the production during a process whichi s largely explorative. It is in a state of becoming while being rehearsed, and continues to evolve as actors take roles and audiences arrive and further contribute to the play’s changing perception. The production changes are not only based on rehearsals but also ultimately what audiences bring to performances. (This explains previews as part of finished productions).

I’ve often been reminded that mid-rehearsal, I begin to lament that what I have been able to create is an impossible mess. Time after time I have thought the production to be pure chaos, right up to a moment when I no longer think that and agree with the audience in applause. They see what we have planned and worked for them to see; and the live audience has the effect of changing the production slightly once again and completing the arc of the work. They put a capstone on it all.

These productions, because written on the wind, don’t exist anywhere save in my memory of them or if we’re lucky the audience’s memory. Time and memory contribute tricks which can’t’ be bottled or held. Scylla and Charybdis appear all over again. For a while during each rehearsal, I as a director need to function in the role of a both lover and critic. Loving script and actors in as they become characters. Critical of early efforts.

Actively working in time, always pointing towards a deadline or an opening night, the work done in the theatre is about using well the time given. Isn’t that the same as definitions of how to measure a life? Making time count is what makes theatre work have the distinctionss that it has. No matter the chaos of rehearsal, it opens on the stated night. Both Scylla and Charybdis are equally present as a opening night curtains fall. Both represent slow and fast passages of time in my life. Too slow or too fast are each dangers to avoid.