It doesn't rhyme with Kennedy

I have a friend who has a character whose name she always pronounced "Al-SEEN" until she met someone who pronounced it "AL-kin" and ever since, that's been the character's name. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I just thought it was a neat little anecdote, but it's more complicated in theatre where a character's name has to be said consistently by the entire cast. It's even more complicated when the name is foreign and needs to be pronounced correctly, the way characters who are native speakers would.

So, like, the name Gennady? It doesn't rhyme with Kennedy. And deep down I knew that but then we got into practice and suddenly every name was getting pronounced a million different ways and I was like, "I'm not even sure how these names are supposed to be said anymore." Which is always an awkward thing to do because I don't know if I'm the only one who gets weird and OCD about looking like she knows EVERY SINGLE THING about the world of her play. So, I always feel like admitting "I'm not sure" about something is a sign of weakness. Like I should have thought about this, why didn't I think about this.

LUCKILY SOMEONE HAD FORESEEN WE MIGHT HAVE THIS DIFFICULTY and a really nice native Russian speaker stopped by rehearsal to confirm, once and for all, how to pronounce all the names. And we took careful notes and parroted back to her and watched as she shook her head at our flat American accents like, "No, no, that's wrong," until we'd approximated it to her satisfaction.

Even something as simple as that morning makes me feel more solid about the play moving forwards: in the future if anyone asks me how to pronounce Valeri or Anatoli or Milena, I know with pretty good authority what to tell them. No more wincing and telling them I have no idea.

Still working on getting a cast picture, but we have our first actual run through and off book day on monday, so I'm looking forward to finally seeing it on its feet all the way through. Even though I've been present for most of the rehearsal process, there are still two scenes that I haven't heard out loud, and it's really important to me to see them tomorrow in case there's something I need to tweak anything - they're two pretty early and important scenes that I want to make sure are spot on since they come so early in the play and give us so much vital information, and I'm actually the tiniest bit uncomfortable that I'm a week into the rehearsal process and haven't managed to see them.

I mentioned before, I definitely feel the pressure this year, because it is my last year in the festival and I have done it for four years and I am one of the two oldest kids in the lineup, and because I saw my mentor from last year last night and he mentioned that "I've heard this is the script that everyone wants to read," although by "everyone" I assume he just means "festival staff" and I'm pretty sure that I'm getting more milage out of the title than I really ought to. Also, that was all one sentence.

I am really, really impressed by some of the summaries for the plays this year - things that just look incredible, written by really young kids (Okay, not so young... fifteen and sixteen years old, which is how old I was when I got into this crazy world). There's one in my week that I am really, really looking forward to seeing and meeting the playwright because she's a sixteen-year-old who wrote a historical piece about a really, really cool topic and when I was sixteen I was writing poorly-planned and poorly-executed magical-realism pieces about greek mythology and bratty kids.

There are also some plays in later weeks that I won't get to see, but I'm really curious about them. There's a guy in week four who I met back when we were both sixteen, and he was lightyears ahead of me then (INCREDIBLE WRITER), so I can only imagine how much better than me he is now.

My first year at Blank, there was a guy a week ahead of me who'd done the festival for five years. I was already missing a year to catch up with him, but I was just some kid from Florida and the whole fact that I'd managed to win three separate competitions with this little play that I'd written on a bet was baffling to me. I was still at a point in my life where I was writing to prove to myself that it wasn't a fluke. I couldn't have known then that I'd go four-and-four in the festival. Now, knowing other kids who've done Blank, who I know from previous years and didn't make it back this year, I'm now realizing that that kind of winning streak is the exception, not the rule.

And I can't explain why I'm here, and some of my brilliant friends who I've met in previous years or at other festivals aren't. I really do not know. And I could chalk it up to luck but that would be belittling the selection process, which I have been assured doesn't have any favoritism involved and actually is harder on returning playwrights. ("We only bring you back if you've improved.") But the more I work on Like a Dog in Space, the more I realize that it's really nothing like my last three years of plays. Structurally, thematically, my choice of characters - it's not like my usual work. Maybe it was the novelty of it that got me in, or my apparent willingness to take risks, or just because it's so damn weird.

I really don't know. And this post is a lot longer than I originally planned it to be, but once I got onto the subject and forced myself to write about it, it turned into a huge monster blog post and I could probably go on about it for another four pages but it would just be me expressing how I'm still not very certain of myself and my skills... and that's not really interesting to read, is it?