I know this thing is doomed. Katie knows it too, though we don’t say it out loud during our afternoon rehearsals in that sweatbox of a studio space in Los Feliz. Michael doesn’t know, which is somehow worse. Or maybe he does.
The heat in LA is biblical, relentless. Beckett. Happy Days. A woman buried up to her waist, then her neck, talking to fill the void while the world ends around her. Seems about right.
Katie’s good, though. Really good. She understands that Winnie isn’t just absurd, she’s all of us, performing cheerfulness while buried alive in our own particular pile of shit. Michael reads Willie, that half-dead husband crawling around in the background. We run the lines. We explore the pauses, those Beckettian silences that mean everything and nothing.
Will this ever see an audience? No. Will it get funding? Absolutely not. Will Katie and Michael and I still be doing this next month, even next week? Doubtful.
Regardless, rehearsing plays nobody’s going to see… you learn.
The way Katie finds a moment in the text, or maybe I discover something human in Willie’s grunts and crawls… that might be the thing I need next year, in some other production that might actually happen.
You show up. You do the work. Because the alternative is staying home, and that’s just Krapp.
No better, no worse, no change No pain.
Katie Sigismund as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days