My Front Tooth Hurts

Driving home at 12:15 am this morning, I noticed my front right tooth was hurting as though I’d been punched in the face. I kept driving, every once in a while noticing the slight pain.

I grabbed it and tried ever so slightly to just wiggle it. I don’t think it actually moved – but in my 12:15 am brain I thought maybe it was loose. But for sure it hurt.

We had just sat through 5 hours of a our first tech rehearsal. Those who work in theatre understand what that means: hours of sitting in the dark running, testing, adjusting, re-running, talking about, moving, running again, of every light cue, sound cue, fog cue, house turning cue, chain cue, entrance cue, music cue, over and over and over again. If it sounds like a slog, it is. Progress is made, but you can’t see that when you’re in it. You can only see that, after it’s over.

For me, as the director, it’s nerve-wracking.You sit in the dark, with all the other designers and technicians and stage managers on headset. You’re not on a headset. Half the time you’re talking to them, you don’t know if they’re listening to you or to someone on headset, and you don’t know if they’re amenable to what you’re requesting, or if they hate you a little bit, because you now want to run the cue with the fog and the house turning for the 7th time. Actors sleep, wait, work on their computers, sleep again, chat chat chat, whisper whisper, then jump up in a total anxiety attack because you just jumped to a scene they’re in – but they’ve been sitting around in the dark for 1 hour and 27 minutes doing essentially nothing.

I realized my tooth hurt because I had been biting down so hard on one of my finger nails, the corner of my notebook and my pen, for so long, that it was as if I had actually been punched in the face.

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Here are some pictures from Tech.