Last night (Wednesday) Michael showed us some stills from recent productions: tightly designed, neatly expressed. Then he presented us with a script to play with, made up of about a page and a half of the material we’d generated on Monday and Tuesday.

We worked our way through it, mostly stitching together the pieces that we already knew by dint of having created them. We worked out transitions. Michael had music/sound, and it worked well.

All told, we have about 10-12 minutes of odd but compelling viewing. Some very nice moments indeed. You might be thrilled; you’d probably laugh at several points (a deliberate provocation on our part).

A couple of thoughts about the class/process so far: First, as Michael was showing his stuff and how it correlated to some of the strategies he’s worked with us on, people were sharing their own experiences in productions that used similar strategies. I kept to my purpose of flying under the radar and just listened, but folks, NCTC has done it all. Yes, it seems that little ol’ Newnan has seen theatre as adventurous and inventive as anything Atlanta has to offer.

It also has become clear that while I have found the class to be invigorating and provocative, it has not been overwhelmingly revelatory: Lacuna has been using the same strategies, and on a much larger scale, of course, as we blunder our way through the “Creativity/Bear/whatever” performance piece. We may have thought we were at a loss, but I have every reason to believe that “real theatre people” would be intrigued by everything we’ve done.

Finally, the class has stirred up my brain to the point that I have had a scathingly brilliant idea for moving forward with King Lear over at Lacuna. All I need is fifteen people who want to blow it all out.