The other night Rob and I were at a party with some of his friends.  One of them remembered Rob had just made his stage debut in the short scene I wrote for the latest Me and Them production and asked, “So, how did the play go?  What was it about?”   Rob started talking about the experience while I remained quiet.  He beams when he talks about it and I enjoy watching him and letting him have the spotlight.  Of course, he gets details wrong, and he doesn’t articulate the themes of the play the way I would, but that’s okay.  I’m usually close enough by to jump in add my own side to the story; correct him when he says we did the play on Flatbush Ave…

The one thing I never add is the true origin of the scene.  I tell people the half-truth and I leave out the truly mushy stuff; that the scene that I wrote and performed with my husband was written as a gift to him.  I was inspired, in a way, by our wedding vows.  In them, I told Rob that one of the reasons I was marrying him was because he makes every day, ordinary things sublime.  I really believe that’s what makes a marriage worthwhile.  It’s not a romantic idyll – don’t let yourself get fooled.  Your soul-mate will never put his dishes in the dishwasher even if the sink is completely full and you will have vicious fights about it.  Your sensitive lover will not write you songs each day on his acoustic guitar but will shave in the sink and never clean it out and you will wonder, “Why am I here again?”   But if you’re like the couple in Landscape of Marriage you get something better.  You get the freedom to be yourself and be totally accepted and loved for who you are.

It was an honor sharing this with my husband.  We had the easiest time rehearsing and developing our performance together.  It was my first time doing live theater in over 10 years and having Rob by my side gave me confidence.  In fact, I will keep collaborating with my husband in different ways as I continue to write and work with Me and Them. 

And really, it gets a little lonely being the only married-over-30 in the group.  I need to keep that guy around for company at the very least!

As I mentioned previously Natalya and I’d worked on Getting Sam before, with her as Melly and me directing.  However, the lead then was an actress called Jacqueline Rose.

Jackie did a fantastic job in the role, but when I started thinking about shooting the play as a short (as it was originally written) back in July I felt we needed someone older.  Jackie is in her early twenties, Melly in her early thirties and more reassured, worldly – something easier to carry off on stage but not so much in film.
That’s when Natalya introduced me to Elizabeth Alice Murray, a talented writer/director as well as an actress.  We met in a little café off Union Square in August and talked for an hour.  She read for the part and I cast her on the spot.

However, the combination of our three busy diaries (summer holidays, other shoots/work, traveling) meant the shoot was pushed, and soon Natalya and I were already starting work on Show Two for Me & Them.

Originally I’d written a piece called Darwin, Adam and Eve for Show Two, in which four NYC friends meet for dinner and discuss the disparities between their families’ traditional hopes for them and their actual lives, but when the writers met for script workshop we all agreed it was too long a piece for the collective.  We discussed how I might split it into two pieces instead but I wanted to save it and spin it into something more complex rather than simplify.  Rather than rush out a new piece for the sake of it, I suggested we use Getting Sam and Natalya agreed.

We went back to Elizabeth but she’d just won a webisode competition for her awesome series Café Conversations so was hard at work moving forward with that.  Step up, Amy Gironda, an actress Natalya had met in a recent class, and we had our new Lorelei.

With previous creative work I have either cast friends or gone through extensive casting sessions but Me & Them engenders a faster, hit-the-ground-running approach than more intricate film projects.  Also, I trust Natalya’s judgment so went with her casting blindly.  As such, I was on tender-hooks when it was time to see what the two of them –Amy/Lori & Natalya/Melly – had done with the piece and I was thrilled.

Though sick, at dress rehearsal Amy was a consummate professional and jumped into the role with full energy.  Seconds after dozing in a chair with flu she was battling Natalya in a dazzling array of verbosity.  I loved what they had done with the piece, which was infuse it with vigor by understanding that for the friendship to be believable and for the beats to fall in the right place, the dialogue needs to be extremely fast: the characters need to almost talk over each other, and use the words as ammunition.

An added bonus was that Amy physically looks very similar to Natalya – I’d always imagined Lori with longer hair, being the shyer of the friends – it tends to give people something to hide behind – but this mirror image presented to the group was a pleasant visual surprise and actually made sense given the script.  Natalya’s first comment on reading Getting Sam had been that she felt the two characters were the two opposites sides of me – and here they were, battling it out.

As I smiled I remembered the term “happy mistake” my fine art professor repeated to us again and again in college – that often it’s the unintentional marks on a page that lead you to a new, advanced place.

Given the chaos and speed of the event overall and Amy’s sickness I left notes for our next rehearsal – we have one scheduled between dress and performance.  Initially I’d been worried that this was not enough and too late in the day, but now I saw that it was only minor tweaks that were needed: Amy to temper Lori with more vulnerability at certain points, a few pacing variations in speed and volume and a few physical interaction notes, that’s all.   I’m excited to work with them again.

It’s really great to have a network of people in a collective like this, who can help eachother out and hook eachother up with talent.

It’s also good to have tools like this that fascilitate communication. It’s one thing to have a collective, but a NETWORKED collective can be very powerful.