The Actors Escape from the Theatre (From the Rehearsal Notebooks of Johnny Downes)

Hello! Johnny here again. Sorry it's been a few days but I've had my hands full wrangling the actors (there's only three of them, but I swear it feels like there are at least twice that many...) and the time does fly when you're in rehearsal. We have been busy running the play and fine tuning it for tech, which starts in a dizzingly short four days.

My boss, the lovely Lady Davenant, who runs the Duke's Company, always says:

"You mustn't keep actors waiting around without the play they'll start to drink then it's quarrels and misbehaving behind the scenery and asking to go home early - utter utter chaos darling, never leave actors with nothing to do, remember that..."

But we gave the whole company Monday night off and invited all our friends to the bar to make all sorts of mischief before we had to buckle down for the last week leading up to tech, and the result was not quite utter chaos, but it was rather poetic and at moments racuous. Our gracious trustee Meghan Beals McCarthy serenaded us with a dramatic interpretation of the bedtime story "Go the *&#% to Sleep," and Caffeine Theatre's esteemed associate artistic director Dan Smith performed a rousing prose poem about the history of dramatic literature, and from there things really took off. Words don't do it justice, but I have a few etchings from the evening that show a bit of its flavor: