The Imago Blog

      You get to a point in a work, maybe before a play opens or after, you get to a point. The point is a feeling expressed as  “I’m done, it’s finished, I don’t want to work on it anymore.” In reality, it is never done. I cook a lot. I enjoy cooking.  In cooking, there is always a conclusion. The meal is finished. It’s either eaten or thrown away, but there’s a completion. The only completion in theatre is death, your death.  Then its over (I guess.)

     Back to this illusionary “point”.  Physically, mentally, emotionally, I am done. That’s not bad really. Sounds bad, but it’s not. Because at that point, I want to go at it again. I want to start something new.  When I get to that  ‘point’ of I’m done, that’s when the inside of me begins to itch - a longing for some new creative path. 

    My  life is chronicled by the plays I produced, directed or performed. When I look back at my life, I can’t remember what happened in any particular year, but I do remember every play, every actor, almost every scene. I have an internal artistic calendar. “Oh if it was ‘Dead End Ed’  then it was 1998.” That’s what the inside of my calendar sounds like.

    Since I work with my hands making masks, I was asked by a journalist what was my favorite tool. I answered a clean sheet of paper. I wish I could find the first scratches on those white sheets of when a new work began.  Sometimes I’ve find them.  Sometimes its just a word or a phrase, a concept, a drawing.  The initial inception.    Oh that blank paper!  Oh, that feeling before I begin to write… despite the economy, the occasional (or sometimes not so occasional) harsh

criticsms,  the difficulty of working in theatre (which I think is the hardest medium, so many people, so many things, so many ideas, so many complications) if I think  of that paper - that clean white slate - I’m ready to work again.

    Anyway, what I really wanted say… I’ve begun to scratch.

Jerry