A few weeks ago, we did a final workshop of “Passage of Dreams” in Minneapolis, this time with the intention of adding some aerial trapeze work, hearing some new orchestrations, and most importantly, putting our new third piece, “Thirst”, on its feet and seeing if it could walk. I always love going to Minneapolis (”always” meaning the two times I’ve been there), because it’s such an interesting town, there’s a wonderfully vibrant arts scene, and some really innovative food to be had. The people are Midwestern-nice, and I always feel like when it comes to theatre, they bring open minds.

Having said that, Katie and I were particularly nervous about “Thirst” because structurally it’s a bit less conventional as far as the marriage of narrative, music, and dialogue goes, and the fact that we’d never read thru the thing without stopping. Illuminating the plight of a nuclear family in the sometime near future who haven’t seen it rain in approximately 15 years, this 30 minute piece has been particularly challenging for me because I haven’t any musical reference points. (How does the future sound? Besides computer bleeps and Buck Rogers stuff?) All we had decided was that music should somehow equate nostalgia for all things sensual, most importantly, liquid. (We’d discussed a set full of empty vessels for water — kettles, watering pots, buckets, all rusted and piled up.) For some reason, my subconscious latched onto the idea of something that “felt” like George Gershwin’s wonderful opera, “Porgy and Bess”. I don’t mean that it “sounds” like Porgy and Bess, but that the feeling it transmits is preserved. What does that mean? I guess to me, P&B simply feels like longing, but specifically, gritty, urbane longing, and more specifically, gritty, urbane longing from about 70 years ago. (This is what artists sound like when we try to explain our impulses…. like a gaggle of New Age telethon operators in baggy pants smoking clove cigarettes.)

Though not without its problems, the piece seems to want to get up and walk. (Did I say clove cigarettes?) And with the infinitely wise and equally hip Producing Artistic Director of the Playwrights Center Polly Carl doing some adhoc dramaturgy for us, we’ve got our meat hooks on some good purchase and are grinding away at it happily, now, back in New York.

As a novice orchestrator, I was gifted with three “thoroughbred” musicians (Diane Tremaine on cello, Alistair Brown on violin, and Kris Anderson on guitar), and one wonderfully generous and capable music director in Denise Prosek. I say “thoroughbreds” because they’re at a level that when they play, you just want them to break out and run and play as hard as they can (regardless of whether or not it’s best for the play). Luckily, they’re all wonderfully intuitive as well, and were able to take some of my gibberish and spin it into some good stuff. I have to say, it’s very rare that a composer gets anything more than a piano during a pre-production workshop, and that’s been incredibly educational for me as an orchestrator.

And the aerial choreography, by Heather Haugen, is going to be brilliant. This was the first time I’d ever done a workshop reading (or anything besides exercise) inside a gymnasium, in order to show Heather’s work. When I asked our violinist Alistair if he’d ever played in such a venue, he said: “Gleason’s? I thought it was going to be a club!”

I’d forgotten how exhausting workshops are, not only because of the long rehearsal hours, but because you’re generally up every night rewriting (3am seemed to be the witching hour this time). And I have to admit, it took me a few days afterwards to recover properly. But then there’s always those moments inside the delirium of a straight six hour rehearsal period and you haven’t slept in four days, when you just step outside of yourself and see these great actors and musicians performing your stuff, and you survey all that wonderful detritus: those binder clips and stray copies of sheet music tossed all over the floor, those boxes of cough drops and broken pencils, and all those music stands stretched tall at attention, all there because of some tune you wrote one night alone in your room that you were sure everyone would hate but gosh it doesn’t sound so bad after all, and you’re just so damn thankful and happy that you’re not sitting in some endless meeting in a windowless room in Manhattan, chained to a desk and a blinking phone waiting until 5pm to come. Those are the moments that you smile and someone across the table sees you and asks you what, what’s so funny? and you’re just like, well… oh… nevermind.