Guest Blogger: Ed Dixon

I woke up early and went to Starbucks. I did not, however, check the weather forecast before I did. It was seventeen degrees with a wind chill of zero. After the "balmy" weather that preceded it, downtown felt positively Arctic and the whole Polar Vortex thing from last year came flooding back. On my way home, my legs stopped working. Pittsburgh has the highest curbs in the country (maybe the world) and I found myself stepping off them like a toddler so as not to tumble like and octogenarian. We had a brief brush-up rehearsal and got ready for the first show of opening week.

Tuesday, November 11 My lifelong friend, Jane Parham arrived in town for the invited dress rehearsaltomorrow and I had lunch with her at Sonoma Grill. Have I mentioned that Sonoma Grill is awesome? So is Jane. We had a marvelous time and then I took her to the theater to see the set. While we were standing there, Zach Moore ran a sound cue, Bizet's Symphony in C… loudly. Both Jane and I burst into tears. Got to introduce her to Ted Pappas who greeted her like an old friend. Good times.

Tuesday, November 4 Started the day REALLY early with packing. They're moving me to housing right next to the theater. The Pennsylvanian is a lovely place but it's a HIKE and the weather is about to turn cold, so I'm really glad to be getting closer to work. After the move we did some trouble areas of the play and tightened the up considerably. Then I did an interview with Bill O'Driscoll from the City Paper. Forgot to mention, I did interviews with Sharon of the Post-Gazette and Alice Carter from the Tribune last week. Both were very enjoyable. We did a run through in the afternoon and it was the first time the first act had come together. The show is an ensemble piece so almost the entire cast is onstage all the time. This means everyone has to be on their toes ALL THE TIME or cues will be missed. This was the first time everyone kept the ball in the air for the entire first act. The second act wasn't as fortunate… one step at a time.

Tuesday, October 28 We started the new week with the top of act two. We sat around and read it. We've started doing this in comfy chairs in a circle rather than around a table and it's very intimate. Then we started at the top. Everyone's on stage from the beginning and it's so marvelous to see how at this point, everyone is really inside the characters so it goes really quickly in a kind of short hand. We got all the way up to the "eleven o'clock number" moment of the second act and quit there.

Monday, October 20 Day off. I had been hearing about "The Strip" ever since I arrived so Deanne Lorette aka Sarah Bernhardt and I trundled off to have lunch there. The surprise is that it's not some Vegas area as you might imagine from the name. It's a very down home neighborhood with a lot of local produce and outside markets. One set of stalls looked like something you might have found in Omaha in the 1950's. Surprising.

In my cranky old age, I have become virtually phobic about all means of public transportation, an odd affectation for someone who has spent his entire life zooming from one theater to another across several countries. My dear friend, Nick Noone knows this about me, so when he learned that I was about to start rehearsing my new play, L'HOTEL at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre, he offered to drive me both to and from. He did this in spite of the fact that he lives nowhere near Pittsburgh or New York City. This has prompted me to refer to him as Mother Teresa del Auto Spirito.

Our final show was a matinee and we had a good crowd… with one exception. There was a special needs patron who kept screaming out things during the first act at the MOST inopportune moments. Apparently he left or was subdued somehow during the second act as we finally had quiet in the house. (To do such a difficult script with running commentary… was QUITE challenging.) I had yet another high school friend in the audience as well as a dresser from the original Broadway company of LES MIZ and a couple of Facebook friends and a student of mine from many years ago. All in all, I greeted many old friends here in Ft. Worth and made several new ones to boot, Ben Williams, Mongomery Sutton, Anthony Fortino, Zak Reynolds and so many others. Plus the whole backstage crew at Casa Manana was a delight. Who could ask (as Mr. Porter said) for anything more?

We started really late… three o'clock and only worked on a few things, just to be together a bit before the first invited audience. There were a couple of hundred students and teachers in the audience and they all stayed for the talkback afterward. The show went surprisingly smoothly for an invited dress and we were all quite pleased with it. So was the audience, judging by their interesting questions afterward. End of rehearsal period.

We continued our work on act one as the day started and to everyone's great surprise, by the dinner break we had staged the entire first act of the play. So when we returned from eating we actually started at the top and worked all the way through act one. Because the play is so enormously serious, Casey broke the tension with humor over and over, and that coupled with looping back numerous times over each section, time seemed to stand still and by the end of the day, we felt that we'd been in rehearsal for a week. Many laughs were had over the fact that we'd all bonded and we'd dunned some of the more difficult passages into our heads and we'd only been at it for TWO DAYS. Then we all realized that we were going to get in more runs of the play than we'd anticipated and suddenly the ten day rehearsal period stopped seeming so frightening. (When I first heard that we were going to stage this gigantic play in ten days, I simply couldn't imagine it.) Did I mention that Casey Hussian is a truly marvelous director?

Casey Hussian (Director) and Ben Williams (Oswald) came to my apartment in New York to discuss the play, OSWALD: THE ACTUAL INTERROGATION. After a VERY interesting chat, we ended up reading through the entire play which was very exciting and invigorating. I had been working on the script for a couple of months before this meeting (since I'm the interrogator, the script is a real bear!) so I was very exciting to jump in with my coworkers. We were all terribly excited about the whole situation when that marvelous meeting concluded.