End of the semester

So, school is winding down enough that I actually have time to blog. It's been a tough semester. They make the first semester insanely difficult, a shock to the system; but they tell me if you can survive it, you'll be OK for the rest of the program. One of the other first-year directors has decided this just isn't the place for him, so there will only be two of us from now on.

I actually have a show I directed running for public performance right now, through Saturday. The Social Issues Project takes the first-year directors, who decide on a "social issue" as a group (ours was "power"), gives them a cast, and sends them off to come up with a cast-generated show. We wanted to talk about all sorts of things, primarily fascism encroaching itself upon the US's economic/government systems, and we went down the wrong road for about a month, and came up with nothing. So I narrowed the focus to what happens when you sign up for a power structure that changes, or wasn't what you thought it was when you signed up. We thought about all the End-User License Agreements we sign up for online without ever reading, and settled on facebook as our metaphor. Using facebook, we're able to talk about the bailout, and safe haven laws, and subprime mortgages... and facebook itself, too. The show's actually pretty good, too- and somehow we actually managed to avoid preachiness. I'm pleased with it.

I also directed a play for the American College Theatre Festival 10-Minute Play competition, and that went really well. I got on great with the playwright and my cast of two, and the production was quite well-received. The ACTF adjudicator actually pointed out my direction and my actors for recognition in his report to the Festival.

I directed a number of scenes for the Musical Theatre Workshop class that the BFA Musical Theatre Majors take. Some went really well (Sunday in the Park with George, The Most Happy Fella, She Loves Me), some did not (Parade, 110 in the Shade, Passion), but I learned an awful lot in that class.

My final project for my Problems in Directing class was a scene from The Crucible, and it also went really well.

And I'm working on my final project for Theatre History, which will be a proposal for a production of A Doll's House. I did a 10-minute presentation on it today, which went relatively well.

All in all, it's been an amazing semester. I'm tired. Really, really tired. And really, really happy and challenged and motivated. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on my mood), my job in Memphis vanished about a week ago. No more working from home online. I'm not upset about it at all- I can live as a grad student does. I'll be happy to have the extra time. But, of course, we had budgeted to have that money coming in this month, and now it's not. So December will be tough, but it's only a month.

Tomorrow is my semester review with my thesis committee, all of whom I quite like and respect. I've got a lot of work to do before now and 1:45 tomorrow afternoon, but I'm not too worried. I think I had a pretty successful first semester. Lots of failures, and lots of learning from those failures. What I really don't want to do is go buy printer ink so I can print the hundreds of pages I need for my "director's book" for my Social Issues Project. I have a mountain of stuff, but it's all electronic, and they can't really flip through a CD. I'll probably go to bed early and get up early- last night I was in bed at 8:30 and up at 4:00 to work on that presentation.

So that's the news from the front porch. I'm sure I'll be blogging more over the Christmas break, and I'll have more time next semester, too. Hope all is well for you and yours...