We just got done with a full day of auditions for GIBBERISH MOSTLY. It was really rewarding and fun, and I think we’re going to end up with a great cast, no matter who makes the final cut. I imagine the decisions will be made later this week.
This is a draft of the poster we’ll use for the production. I like it, and am glad we ended up with this tagline (we went back and forth with a few different options). My understanding is that the woman’s face underneath will be replaced with the face of the actor who’s eventually chosen to play the lead, Nicole.
The only other observation I wanted to get down for posterity is that I wrote the first draft of this play back when I was 31 or 32. And it’s interesting to me, now that I’m in my 40s, how my own perception of people in their 40s has changed.
Back when I first wrote this I found it slightly hard to imagine that two parents in their mid-40s would be so focused on their own happiness, yearning for independence and reliving their youth despite being in what I considered the later stages of life.
Now that I have a lot of friends in this demographic I realize how little can change in people’s personalities. There are folks in their 40s, 50s and 60s who yearn for a glimmer of youth and a kind of do-over in the way that the parents in this play do.
The play and its message of feeling trapped, and especially Rose’s feeling that she’s serving a life sentence by caring for her autistic child well into adulthood, is something I can easily imagine and understand. It’s helping me hone the piece in a more emotionally rich way and pull the parents out of a certain one-dimensionality that I think they were in when I first drafted it.
Really looking forward to continuing to work on this one, and seeing how it ultimately turns out.
