Work on Woman in Mind:

A Discussion of Directing

In the fall of 1989, my mother mailed me a theater review clipped from the Washington Post, writing that she thought I would find it interesting. The show, Woman in Mind, by Alan Ayckbourn, sounded amusing and entertaining, but I was embroiled in several other shows and projects at the time, so the review went into my desktop slush-pile for several months. With the spring semester, though, and the rediscovery of the review during some much-needed sorting and filing, came time to hunt down the script. I found a copy of the play at Brazos Books, and within one reading found myself entranced. The comedy was exhilarating, but the tinge of tragedy in the work kept it from being a mere light farce. This was a show I wanted to see performed on the Rice campus -- and, I came to realize more and more, that I wanted to direct myself. I secured permission to direct the play for the Players 1990-91 season, proposed the play to the Coordinators, and rejoiced when it was accepted.

Now came the hard part. My only previous directing experience, aside from short scenes, was a final class production, and a deliberately minimalist one, of Lanford Wilson's The Great Nebula in Orion, starring Lisa Hxxxxxxxxx and Samantha Hxxxxxx, two of the most accomplished actresses on campus at the time. What would it be like to direct a much longer work, for public performance, with a much larger cast containing probably less experienced actors? At least I had the summer to work through my ideas.

I read and re-read Woman in Mind, both through the end of the semester and at the start of the summer, and started to become conscious of some of the features that had first attracted me. The speech patterns were intriguing -- very British, of course, and thus somewhat strange to American ears, but still slightly quirky aside from that. The choppy, broken-up sentences, particularly for the character of Bill the doctor, bespoke a welter of realized, changing, and frustrated intentions in the characters. As I became more and more familiar with the text, I saw more and more connections among the parts, and more and more subtle additions to the plot: the way features in Susan's real life kept cropping up in her fantasies, the increasingly less subtle hints that Bill's wife is cheating on him with his partner, Geoff Burgess. What had at first seemed a simple and charming comedy was rapidly revealing itself as a complex and multi-layered plot.

Before leaping into the hazier world of interpretation, I decided to start with purely factual investigations into the script. I compiled a list of entrances and exits, along with the location each character was, presumably, going to or coming from. At the same time, I assembled a list of necessary costumes, props, and light and sound cues. Just these simple exercises soon yielded interesting insights. Examining the entrance/exit list, I noticed that I really only needed two entrances: a "real" entrance to the house and an "imaginary" entrance from the tennis courts, etc. of the fantasy family. My blocking could thus be simpler than in the three-entrance Farnsworth Pavilion configuration. Moreover, I noticed a definite shift in blocking as the play progressed. Towards the beginning, most entrances were from the "real" side: either real family members or else fantasy family members entering the house on business (fetching champagne, etc.). Then, as the play progressed, action seemed more and more to center on the "fantasy" entrance, until by the last scene everyone needed to enter from that side. The play's major action, Susan's gradual slide towards her imaginary family and madness, was making itself felt even in the most basic blocking.

The props list prompted several questions that led me into deeper analysis of the characters: when Gerald brings out the Marsala sherry, he brings out a tray with glasses as well. "What sort of glasses?" I asked myself. Visualizing the elegant champagne flutes I hoped to use for the fantasy family, nothing seemed more appropriate as a contrast for the dull, plodding Gerald than an array of mismatched glasses, taken up at random from the kitchen. After all, why shouldn't Gerald be as incompetent in the kitchen as his sister? One of Muriel's basic traits thus extended itself to Gerald, further linking together that family. I told my props person to be sure the glasses and teacups Gerald and Muriel brought out would not be matching sets. The costume list required that I think about color, so I decided that the real family should be darker and drabber, the imaginary family lighter and more colorful, a visual reinforcement of their behavior.

I knew from past work in Farnsworth that the set needed to be minimal. Luckily, the only items of furniture the script specifically refers to are chairs, and it doesn't even say how many. I chose to use three, to allow Susan, Gerald and Bill all to sit down together during their discussions. A mere three pieces of lawn furniture, however, was a bit spartan even for my taste, so I came up with the idea of placing low planters in front of the first row of seats to demarcate the garden and emphasize the small size of Susan's actual surroundings. The planters solved further problem: they provided a place for Lucy to place the champagne glass she brings in late in the first act, and, during blocking rehearsals, proved a godsend as a place to seat actors to get them out of the sightlines in the finale. I laid out my stage on paper, deciding where off-stage features such as the lake and the tennis courts were, and realized the "dead bush" the real characters constantly refer to could be right in the middle of the "imaginary" aisle -- the two worlds of the play are represented by the dead bush and the rose garden, each invisible to the inhabitants of the other, so the bush would close off that gap for one set of characters but "evaporate" when the others appeared.

Once back at Rice for the fall semester, I was able to do further research before auditions began. I checked out several books on Ayckbourn from the Rice library to find out more about the man and his work. Particularly helpful was the Methuen "Writer-File" File on Ayckbourn, compiled by Malcolm Page, one of a series of books documenting the work of major playwrights of the last century. Published in 1989, it contains plot summaries of all Ayckbourn's plays, up to and including Woman in Mind and a few of Ayckbourn's subsequent works, as well as quotes from newspaper reviews and interviews with the playwright. The series is a treasure-trove of information: I have since bought the book on Tom Stoppard, and hope to acquire a copy of the Ayckbourn volume for myself as well. The bibliography at the back of the "Writer-File" lists newspaper articles and interviews, so I was also able to use the library's microfilm copies of the London Times and New York Times newspapers to look up information on the original London and New York productions of the play, and Ayckbourn's observations to interviewers on his work and its intentions.

Reading the plot summaries in File on Ayckbourn soon revealed a parade of oblivious husbands, of disappointing, self-destructing and self-destructive marriages held together with a thin veneer of homely pretense. Again and again, Ayckbourn writes of men and women unable to understand or live with one another, of attempted niceness that hurts rather than helps, of parents who unwittingly maim their children for life. In interview after interview, Ayckbourn spoke of a comedy as "a tragedy that has been interrupted." Michael Billington's book Alan Ayckbourn (MacMillan, 1983) speaks of the playwright's themes as "the narcissism of the neurotic, the ruthlessness of the vulnerable, the total insensitivity to others of those who register their own emotional disturbances with seismic precision," and "insensitivity, egoism, domineering arrogance, the joylessness of middle-class marriage, the hollowness of social and family rituals, parental misunderstanding, our repeated failure as human beings to find ways of living together or communicating with each other." Obviously, Woman in Mind was not a bold stroke into new territory for Ayckbourn: virtually every one of the above themes finds its way into Susan's sad saga, revealed in Gerald and Susan's marriage, in Rick's attitude towards his parents, in Muriel's sad attempts at homemaking.

Newspaper research yielded further riches. I knew I could have high hopes for the play when, spooling through the New York Times microfilm, I came across a front-page shot in the Arts section of a smiling Ayckbourn in a Houston Astros T-shirt -- a favorable omen, I hoped. The same article yielded valuable insights into Susan and Gerald's relationship: a portrayal of marriage as "holy deadlock" and of Susan and Gerald's marriage as a battle between "his self-righteous complacency and her repressed fury," and Alan Ayckbourn's description that "It's like being in a padded cell.... [Susan] can be outrageous, and [Gerald will] just turn away in silent prayer and forgive her. And there's nothing more infuriating than being forgiven when you need a good row." (interview with Benedict Nightingale, "A Woman of Two Minds, Both in Turmoil," New York Times, 14 Feb. 1988, Sec. H, p. 5,30). My first impression of Gerald as a peevish, sniping husband began to fade away, replaced by the concept of an impervious, remorselessly merciful prelate.

I have always remembered Maggie Smith's advice, from when she visited Rice with an ACTER troupe three years ago, that "if the audience doesn't like the character you're playing, and you're not the villain, you have a problem." Gerald certainly is no great friend to Susan, but he is not entirely to blame for her situation either. And, sure enough, I found Ayckbourn saying that "I'm really showing how sad it is that people can try to be nice and that it sometimes doesn't work. I'm saying that a lot of the worst things that happen in life are the result of well-meaning actions." (interviewed by William Foster, "Playwright in the Round," In Britain, 35, May 1980, p. 24). A few years later, the playwright said that "Mainly I want to say things about the fear and distrust people have for each other, the fact that men and women still don't seem to understand each other very well. There are too many people in the world who are likely to leave important decisions they should make until far too late." (interviewed by Bryan Appleyard, "Still Hoping for Heroes," The Times, 18 Aug 1982, p. 7) -- Susan's predicament exactly. Gerald may be horrid, but Susan must share in the blame for their marriage, as conversations with Gerald, Muriel, and Rick show, first obliquely but then with increasing candor, climaxing with Rick's complaints about her heavy-handed treatment of his teenage girlfriends.

One of Ian Watson's Conversations with Ayckbourn (Macdonald, 1981) tightened up my view of the marriage which seems so central to the play: "I think a big piece of us dies in a marriage.... [We either fail to adjust, or else] one personality, being stronger, will eclipse the other...." (pp. 120-21). And the London Times capped off the analysis, with Ayckbourn's statement that "I wouldn't say that men are totally guilty of oppressing women.... There's a great deal of female oppression as well. Once the initial passions are past, you move into the next phase, which is a jockeying for position to try to retain your sense of self, because everything you've established seems threatened. You begin to clear a bit of the jungle you can call your own ground, and the other person is busily hacking away, doing the same. It may all be done smilingly, but the knives are out." (interview with Michael Church, "Shakespeare of the South Bank," Sunday Times, 1 June 1986, pp. 41-2). Susan has, perhaps, been "eclipsed" during much of her marriage, but she is occupied now in trying to fight her way free, into being her own self. Susan's goal, or spine, to be Stanislavskian, is "to construct, guard, and maintain a favorable self-image" -- whether it be beloved wife and mother to her fantasy family or sorely wronged parent to her real son. Gerald has much the same goal, with his denial of anything denying marital bliss or implying his failure at being anything but the perfect husband and father. It is the clash between their two irreconcilable versions of reality that produces the fire of their arguments. Muriel, too, strives for identity, with her constant, though inadequate, attempts at domesticity, and her hallucinations of her dead husband.

One source caused me some disturbance: in his journal article "Craft, Character, Comedy: Ayckbourn's Woman in Mind" (Twentieth Century Literature, XXXII (Spring 1986), pp. 23-39), Bernard F. Dukore suggests that Bill Windsor's confession of love to Susan in the second act is itself a part of her fantasies, a new symptom of growing insanity and the natural follow-up to Andy's foreshadowing "Nothing is who it is! No one is what he seems!" (p. 64). I later talked this idea over with Peter Sxxxxxx, the actor who I cast as Bill Windsor. Neither of us particularly cared for it. If Bill is a fantasy for the entire scene, what are we to make of Muriel's brief entrance (p. 68), whistling for Spikey? Either she, too, is a hallucination, or, since she refers to "either of you," both she and Bill are real. Bill's presence on stage is simply too lengthy -- eleven pages out of forty in the second act, in this "scene" alone -- to write off as hallucination, for where do we reasonably put the dividing line between reality and fantasy? Peter and I decided that Bill became a fantasy being somewhere in the middle of his attempted dialogue with Lucy, as he prattles on to empty air and the other imaginary family members troop in. The script already has enough clues about Bill's affections: to let him carry them through seemed only logical, particularly since Peter and I both seemed to find Bill's spine as "to protect Susan and, in so doing, to be close to her."

With a solid base of analysis, I began to feel ready for the auditions. But the tryouts were the worst part of the play for me, probably because they were the portion in which I had the least experience. I had done analysis in English and theater classes and directed short scenes and Great Nebula, but my only casting experience was advising about the smaller, more homogeneous cast of Bren Dubay's Secrets. The overabundance of information, possibilities, combinations, the necessity of balancing everyone and everything among roles, scenes, and readings, produced an information overload. I realize running auditions smoothly and efficiently probably requires some practice and, gritting my teeth, hope I can get that practice in the future, but it was certainly daunting for the first time.

I was somewhat annoyed that Secrets had tired out most of the premiere actresses on campus -- I had been hoping to see Samantha Hxxxxxx try out for the part of Susan -- but the response at auditions was good. Jeanne Fxxxxx had the right look for Susan: pretty enough to be a likeable heroine, but not too glamorous to be a forty-year-old harried housewife. John Kxxxx matched her in height, and had the stolid, deadpan sort of delivery I thought Gerald required. Aron Dxxxxxx showed the right sophisticated, detached air for a son who had been replacing family with philosophy, and I had seen him in shows and knew he worked well. I had thought of Peter Sxxxxxx as Bill even while first reading the play, and was happy to see him do well in auditions: I thought he and the part made an unusually good match. Cannon Lxxxx had the solid presence and romantic look I wanted for Andy, and Alison Cxxxx, bouncy and bubbly, was obviously well-suited to Lucy.

Muriel and Tony were two of the hardest parts to cast, probably because, though small, they needed to fit well with the rest of the cast. Amy Hxxxxxxx seemed the best fit of all my choices for Muriel: she and John could be plausible siblings, and I thought she could deliver Muriel's insecure sniping attacks. Tony was the hardest of all: I struggled long and hard to choose among Jason Wxxx, Colin Bxxx, and David Txxxxxxx. I decided at last on David for several reasons. Light and blond, he provided a visible contrast to Andy, giving the fantasy family more variety and interest. Also, Jason and Colin both seemed too "heavy," too jaded and secure to play the carefree playboy I saw Tony as. As it turned out, the cast worked well, both together and in the show.

The cast and I spent the first week of rehearsal reading over the play together, marking "beats" and making character inventories and descriptions. From the start I could see varying abilities and interests in the cast: Peter, Aron, Dave, and Alison all discovered a great deal and made astute comments, and Jeanne, Cannon, and John all had to be pushed to ask and answer questions. This difference obviously had something to do with acting experience, but it was also to prove frustrating as the production progressed.

With the second week of rehearsals, we began rough blocking. The directors I have worked under have generally fallen into two categories when directing stage movement. Katie Sammons and Bob Ives, frequent Baker Shakespeare directors, exemplify the first category, which I will call "rigid": they give all the blocking to the actors, usually with little discussion or interaction between performer and director. The second category, characterized by Sandy Havens and, even more extremely, Alan David, might be described as "flexible" or "lenient." In Alan David's case, he would indicate the entrances for a scene, sit back, and tell the actors to "just come in and do something." Whatever the (frequently awkward) result, he would make comments, compliments, and suggestions, and try it again. If actors disagreed with Alan's suggestions, he would often encourage them to try the scene as they wanted. Sometimes it worked out well -- more often, the actors proved him right. Gradually, the scene took on the flavor of his direction, but through the actors' contributions and his gentle nudges. I have always disagreed with "rigid" blocking: it seems to me too likely to force actors to generate a character from blocking, rather than vice versa, as "flexible" blocking allows. So I resolved to try to be "flexible" while directing Woman in Mind.

I soon discovered exactly why Katie and Bob had probably fallen into the rigid school. Flexible blocking, with no surprise, depends a great deal on the actors. Aron Dxxxxxx responded the best, often stopping during his lines to say "I feel like moving" -- so I would encourage him to do so, or explain why I thought a delay might be better. Peter Sxxxxxx displayed amazing improvement during the course of rehearsal. By final rehearsals, I was able to say that some moment of his needed fixing, and he would spontaneously show me a couple of different revisions. Much of Bill's business resulted from flexible blocking, and Amy and Alison both achieved wonderful moments when left to themselves with gentle suggestions. While blocking the complex voice-exchange scene between Andy and Susan (pp. 63-64), I wanted Andy standing at the center of the stage, rock-solid, manipulating Susan as she ran around the edges under his control. During the actual exchanges, I wanted both actors still, to avoid distractions from the already confusing business of "channeling" off-stage fantasy family members. Cannon disagreed: he thought movement might work better. So I urged him to try it and, after running through it once, he agreed that movement didn't really fit. Flexible blocking triumphs again, in making both actors and director happy.

Some actors, however, had more difficulty with my new-found philosophy. John Kxxxx, when given free rein for blocking, tended to inch all around the stage, never making a definite cross but always edging his way somewhere. I had seen and solved this with Lisa Hxxxxxxxxx during Great Nebula, so I tried the same tack with him as I had with her: we worked particularly hard on separating "still" from "moving" moments. Some lines he was supposed to hold place, but on others he should move. This solution had a bit of the "rigid" flavor, but still seemed to work. Jeanne Fxxxxx was John's exact opposite: she would stand stock-still and recite her lines until told to move. Perhaps I gave up too easily, but I eventually threw up my hands and lay out stage movements one by one for her, giving motivations as well so they would not look too wooden. Other actors sometimes had similar problems, and I resorted to similar solutions.

I was rapidly finding out that "flexible" blocking tends to produce "flexible" schedules -- they stretch! The rigid school of thought sacrifices spontaneity to schedules. And Jeanne, sure enough, felt paralyzed without making sure she was exactly on the mark -- I had to plead during final rehearsals for a bit of "fuzziness" in the actors' blocking, so it would look less mechanical. I understand much better now why Katie and Bob use the "rigid" school for their often inexperienced actors on tight schedules, but still feel the Havens/David "flexible" approach works better if an actor is free enough to enjoy and profit from it.

I found the process of laying out blocking itself much easier than I had thought. I kept two principles in mind at all times: what I will call "approaches vs. escapes," and "where haven't we been?" Many scenes, such as Rick's conversation with Susan which opens the second act, or Susan's talk with Bill in which she lies about Rick's marriage, divide neatly into lines when the character makes an "approach," moving closer either physically or verbally, or an "escape," a corresponding movement away. Blocking needs to exhibit these changes. Thus, Jeanne and I worked out that she would move or turn away from Bill when one of his questions turned up a sensitive subject ("And what's he going to do now?", "Are they moving in locally?", p. 69) and turn back when she had found an answer (often embroidering the truth) that she could comfortably give ("He's getting married," "Ricky has a job lined up there," ibid.) Similar ideas worked for the Susan-Rick scene, though there Susan had almost all the approaches, and Rick the majority of the escapes. Approach vs. escape is really just a simplified version of "theatrical intentions," aimed to point out the contrasts and tensions which should motivate movement.

"Where haven't we been?" worked exactly as it sounds. My biggest worry in the Farnsworth Pavilion was adequately staging for the round (Great Nebula had been on proscenium). I knew I needed to balance the blocking for an audience on all sides (even more so with only two entrances), so I tried to make sure the characters used all areas of the stage and changed facing enough to display themselves adequately. Usually this was linked with an approach or escape: the thin crescent of stage behind the lawn chairs, easily neglected, proved a useful destination for escapes, since it put the furniture between the escapee and the pursuer. Aisles proved useful for drawing characters' movement and attention back to the house or "imaginary estate" on thoughtful lines ("internal escapes"?).

Dr. Huston told me after the play that he thought the blocking was particularly well-balanced, and unobtrusively and naturally so. It seems my streamlined set of theatrical principles proved useful guidelines. The one unforeseen problem, though, that bedeviled me during final rehearsals (when it was too late to change the blocking) was the lighting. I had not realized that having my tall actors (particularly John and Jeanne) stand near the edges of the stage would make it impossible to light them fully with the one ring of lights Farnsworth allows. So, while the actors used the stage space fairly evenly, the lighting was often anything but even.

Memories of The Great Nebula in Orion both helped and hindered direction at times. I had blocked Lanford Wilson's play on a proscenium stage, so characters tended to deliver their monologues while facing outwards to the audience. I continued this practice for Woman in Mind, only to realize late in the rehearsal process that the "power point" for speaking on an arena stage is indeed at the edge, but facing across the stage to the larger wedge of audience thus visible opposite the actor. Some hasty reblocking fixed some of these situations, but others were not salvageable: I just tried to insert some extra turns before or after the monologue to even exposure out for the other audience members.

Further, Great Nebula concerned only two people, one of whom often talked to the audience while the other was completely oblivious. I had thus gotten into a bad habit of letting one character stagnate while the other carried on with business. This dereliction of directorial duty showed itself most painfully in the Susan-Gerald-Muriel argument scene (pp. 27-32), when I abandoned Muriel on one side of the stage, facing into the audience and totally uninvolved in the continuing spat between Susan and Gerald. I should have remembered Ayckbourn's own words: "I made a vow when I was an actor with nothing to do except wait for my line on p. 49, than in my plays there would be no butlers, waiters or soldiers with spears." (interviewed by Mel Gussow, "Ayckbourn, Ex-Actor, Now Plays Singular Writer of Comedies," New York Times, 11 Oct. 1974, p. 30). When the error was drawn to my attention, a few suggestions to Amy Hxxxxxxx and some facial expressions on her part drew her right back into the action -- and a more successful scene. I learned not to take the easy way out, and to keep a better balance between clearing the arena and involving the characters.

Great Nebula, like much of Lanford Wilson's work, is a very "talky" play. For much of the play, the script affords no convenient opportunities for movement, so the characters must just sit in chairs and speak to one another. In that play, I came to the solution of having Lisa and Samantha shift position in their chairs: if they could not physically move about, they could at least introduce variety by leaning forward, rotating left or right, and so on. Without this previous experience, I might have been stymied indeed on what to do with Susan. I wanted her to sit in several scenes of the play: at first, because she has recently suffered a blow on the head and needs to be faint; later, because I wanted her to be marginalized, with action going on around her outside of her control. In my blocking, Susan tended to either move about the edges of the stage, getting little done and reacting to events rather than influencing them, or else stand or sit while events ran on around her, beyond her power to affect. The former situation was easy to handle. As for the latter, I just specified that the garden chairs had to be armless, and applied the lessons I had learned from Great Nebula.

My work with Lanford Wilson's play also provided a host of smaller helps and pratfalls. Lisa Hxxxxxxxxx knew New York fairly well, so she was able to keep us fairly straight on our references in the play. I should have remembered to always have on hand some way of checking facts, and to use it: I did not know until final rehearsals that "Lapsang Souchong" (p. 15) was a type of tea, not champagne as I had assumed. The joke never did play right because we didn't know what we were really talking about until too late. (Shades of a Midsummer Night's Dream production I was in last year, when I had to correct the director during final rehearsals that "buskins" were boots, not brassieres -- I'm glad I've been able to try the shoe on the other foot!)

The fine-tuning of the play during final rehearsals was, aside from auditions, one of the more frustrating moments for me as a director. Differing attitudes towards the language were a major source of contention. Woman in Mind is a play littered with pauses, periods, dashes, ellipses -- a jumble of sentence fragments. I felt that this was an important feature, for both the philosophy (showing lack of effective communication) and the humor of the play, and should be reflected in the delivery. After all, Ayckbourn had said he wanted "to write a very serious play that makes people laugh all the time, a play in which all the laughter comes from words like yes or no, or even from the pauses between them." (interviewed by Benedict Nightingale, "Ayckbourn -- Comic Laureate of Britain's Middle Class," New York Times, 25 Mar 1979, Sec. II, p.1) Peter Sxxxxxx's Bill Windsor realized this effect most thoroughly, not only through having the lion's share of excess periods but also because he fully respected the text. Some actors, notably Jeanne Fxxxxx, seemed actively hostile when I would suggest deeper attention to the text. Admittedly, my Shakespeare background and English training tend to make me more of a textualist than most, closely examining optimum emphases, understood parallelism, and so on, and I may have been guilty of micro-management at times. I also worked hard to try to get the actors to speak in pure, standard American diction (as the Players did in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest), which also met considerable resistance. But I still feel the play needs actors who are punctilious about punctuation.

Giving notes proved another hurdle at times. I am going to watch myself carefully the next time I act, because I do not think I have enough method in my madness: I am not yet familiar enough with the process of acting to always give coherent notes. The sheer quantity of information to watch for in a production -- diction, volume, position on stage, body language, eye contact, appearance of motivation, and on and on, through countless intangibles -- sometimes seemed overwhelming, perhaps another reason why I sometimes found it easy to go "back to basics" with punctuation and emphasis. All too often, when I tried to address a larger issue, such as the "feel" of a scene, I found myself struggling for vocabulary.

The play had plenty of note-worthy problems in its final stages. Often blocking seemed to wander in its position relative to lines, throwing off the associated motivations. Trying to tighten it up often resulted only in the worst manifestations of the "rigid blocking" school. I went on a special crusade for achieving "motivated walks" when some of the blocking seemed to be performed just for blocking's sake, rather than because of any need on the part of the character. A last-minute plea for "fuzziness" brought matters at last to a happy medium.

I had been spoiled by directing Lisa and Samantha, who showed notable improvement at each of our tight, infrequent rehearsals or with the smallest suggestions for Great Nebula -- Jeanne and John often had to be coaxed along, improving only during rehearsals and not in between. Even in our rehearsals, I was sometimes unable to make notes take hold. Scenes with weak lines remained weak, and interpretation changes proved remarkably difficult. I made the grievous mistake early in the production of not striving for a radically different feel between the real and fantasy scenes: I had an idea of seamlessness, of showing Susan's confusion by letting the worlds flow almost imperceptibly from one to the other, letting the necessary emotional changes come from the lines. But, too late, I realized the two needed to be markedly different -- and Jeanne balked at taking the notes. In the final week of rehearsals, I urged her just to make the effort to smile in her fantasy scenes, to make the choice to stay with the fantasy family and to be happy in her choice, but all too often she remained glum-looking, even in the happy garden tea party at the end of Act I. I suspect we had differing interpretations, though I wish she had discussed it with me rather than carrying on as before. Although she performed admirably in a challenging role, the Houston Chronicle review pointed out the lack of notable difference between the two worlds. Still, the show received favorable reviews from all sources (Everett Evans of the Chronicle delivering his usual waspish compliments), and I confess enjoying watching the show myself, even laughing at moments, despite having immersed myself in it for four weeks of rehearsal.

Watching the show was always interesting: I was able to attend most of the eight performances. I tried to sit in a different area of the theater each night, and found that the blocking had come out reasonably well-balanced after all. Provided with large and generously laughing audiences, the actors shone, deftly threading their way through the plot with hardly a problem. Some nights I enjoyed watching the audience more than the performers: watching their faces as a joke took hold, comparing their reactions as the timing of lines varied slightly each night, all helped me to feel the actor-audience relationship better. I am proud and pleased to have been able to work with such a script and such a cast, and I look forward to my next opportunity, hopefully soon, to take part in that unique combination of cooperation and command, directing a play.

Special thanks to Sandy Havens for all his help, especially in this production, but also in joyful Players shows over many years. Much love, best wishes, and Merry Christmas.

All page numbers for Woman in Mind are from the Faber & Faber 1986 edition.