Rock and Roll

Posted August 24th, 2004 by Sean Williams

I went and saw a show written by my best friend and directed by my wife, so to say I thought it was great won’t really do much for you. To say that the show sold out, that the run is sold out, and that every person who was there swarmed Jordana to offer congratulations on her uncanny knack for handling the wickedest of theatrical cicumstances might tell you more. If you need notoriety, New York directors Anthony King and Boris Kievsky ranted on and on about how great the show was.

If you really need celebrity, Micheal Mastro grabbed Jordana and wouldn’t let her leave.

Maybe the best, though, is all of the actors in the show who came up to me afterwards to tell me what a wonderful job Jordana did, that it was so great to have someone brilliant at stagecraft who still thought from an actor’s point of view, who knew both what she wanted and how to communicate it.

The script was originally done several years ago, and Jordana and I played the leads in it. I’m sure Mac didn’t think that this would be the script of his that was mounted and re-mounted every six months, but it’s such a fantastic piece of writing, and the characters are so rewarding, that everyone wants to produce it. I can tell you this, it’s not possible for me to watch anything Mac’s written and not wish I was playing all the roles, but this is one play where I feel very proprietary. That being said, the man who played my role was FANTASTIC.

It’s an interesting point that all three of us have reached. I think it’s becoming clear to us that we can work for free in the off-off world as long as we want, but at a certain point we need to see if something bigger might be out there. It’s like a coin collector who one day realizes that his collection is only worth something if he’s willing to sell it. Are we willing to stop doing these small pieces over which we have quite a bit of control?

In order to answer that question, we may be forced to decide who we are, each of us. Yes, we are all producers, and there’s no reason that producing would preclude anything else, but it’s a really tough call to be a director one day and to be on the other side of the casting table the next, to be a writer who is going to go to casting calls every day, to hone your skills as an actor and to still be trying to present yourself as a director.

At our level, we can do it all. At the next level, we need to be better than good at it. All three of us are competent at a number of things, but if we decide to work only on jobs that pay well and are satisfying artistically, we’re going to have to focus on the things at which we are brilliant. My friend Jon once said to me, “There’s no point in being a good poet”, and at the time I found it sad, but I’m realizing he’s right.