30 Days of NYMF Day 2: The Children

By Stan Richardson, bookwriter and lyricist of The Children

I have not been banned from rehearsals, per se.  No, it is nothing like what Our Lord Bob Fosse did to the Apostle Steven during rehearsals for Pippin.  In fact, aside from the brains and the talent, my director Tony is nothing like Bob Fosse: he is extraordinarily patient, he has a full head of hair and, though terribly attractive, he is not a womanizer.  (The women are safe.  This is a safe space for women.) 

No, it is a self-imposed ban—though unprotested!—for about three rehearsals.  They're staging the last chunk of the play: honoring, violating and ultimately improving my script.  The actors' every twitch and inflection conjures on my face—that unmistakable barometer of authorial intent!— alternate expressions of agony and ecstasy.   

The irony of this show being called The Children is not lost on me.  Hal, the composer (and the more diplomatic half of this duo), likens rehearsal to letting the kid go off to school.  And the school we've chosen (nay, the one organized specifically for this little tyke) is—from our producers all the way down (or up?) to that girl from Bennington with all the piercings who made photocopies for us all of August—the best in the county.  But what happens if, on the WAY to school, the bus passes through a cloud of radioactive waste from a leak at a nearby nuclear power plant and the children's fingernails turn black and they roam around in a zombified state, microwaving people to death with a hug?  I worry about these things. 

But my facial expressions, my facial expressions—they have caused me trouble all my life!  Sometimes I think on Leroux's phantom of the Paris Opera House (note: good idea for a musical?) and wonder if I too should toss some acid on my face and wear a mask.  And carry a rose.  I certainly know now what my mother felt like on that languorous summer afternoon as she lay helplessly on the beach while my infant self, wading in the Mississippi, was suddenly ripped apart by a shark.  (The lower half of my body was not originally mine.) 

Will the critics be those same sharks or the dolphins that ultimately came to my rescue?  Or will they not show up in this figurative Mississippi at all?   

Why am I so anxious?  The first three-fourths of the show looks better, sounds better, feels better, smells better, tastes better than anything I'd imagined.  Why would the last fourth be any different?   

I'm going to rehearsal today!  I'm going to burst into that room, halt the proceedings and go up to every single person individually and tell them that I'm happy they're there, that I believe in them, and that it'd be a lot funnier if they said the line like—NO!  No, they'll figure it out.  They always have in the past.  Always.  In the past… three weeks that I've known them.   

Faith.  Trust.  (Faith?!  Trust?!)  What's this?  Valium?  That works, too.