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As part of the Playworks Program here at the International Thespian festival, students have the opportunity to audition and rehearse one of the plays being workshopped. The audition day was very intense. We sat through auditions from 9:00 am straight through to 12:45 and then we have half an hour to cast the roles between five plays. Students were put in groups and performed in scenes from the individual plays with monologues, duets or trios. Over the course of the morning, we say 185 students and that doesn't count the students we saw twice who were called back. By 11 am we were starting to feel the time crunch. Call backs were discouraged, repeat reads had to be culled down, we had to see the groups and move on if we were ever going to make sure every students got their moment.

Put on a stage-crew intercom headset and listen to stage manager, Mark Stevens, calling some of the lighting, follow spot and set cues for the San Diego REP's musical production of "HAIRSPRAY." No rehearsed action is taken by the stage crew unless they hear the word "GO" from Mark's lips. The sound feed from the actors has been turned down on the headset so the crew members can clearly hear Mark's directions. No talking on the intercom please.

" But why does mere revision make so many Shakespeare fans so uncomfortable? Some people don't like any alterations to Shakespeare's text nor even presenting them in anything other than their historical settings. To me, such an ultrapurist approach can lead to what I somewhat derisively call "museum piece Shakespeare"-though, I must say, I do enjoy visiting and spending hours in museums, and among my favorite stagings of Shakespeare are text-centric, historically costumed productions. But even these are cut for length. Furthermore, to varying degrees, each could be called an "adaptation" because any time an actor picks up a Shakespearean role, he or she is adapting it for that production, and sometimes adapting it from performance to performance, depending on the theater and audience."

"René Magritte must have had mornings like that. Think of the painting he made in 1935. The painting is called "La Clef des songes" (The Interpretation of Dreams). It is a painting of a board with four panels. The board is like an old school primer, used to teach children the names of things. There is a horse, a clock, a pitcher, and a valise. Under the objects are words. The horse is labeled "the door." The clock is labeled "the wind." The pitcher is labeled "the bird." And the valise is labeled "the valise." Why are three objects mislabeled, while one object is correctly labeled? Maybe it is like our confused morning at the market. We felt odd not because the fruits were labeled incorrectly, but because the relationship of signs suddenly struck us as utterly arbitrary even when everything had been labeled correctly. Likewise, when we see the three incorrectly labeled objects in "La Clef des songes," we begin to distrust even the correct labeling of the valise. What does the word "valise" have to do with the picture of the valise, and what does the picture really have to do with the actual thing? When we represent reality in words or pictures, do we come closer to that reality, or push it further away?"

"Artists frequently hide the steps that lead to their masterpieces. They want their work and their career to be shrouded in the mystery that it all came out at once. It's called hiding the brushstrokes, and those who do it are doing a disservice to people who admire their work and seek to emulate them. If you don't get to see the notes, the rewrites, and the steps, it's easy to look at a finished product and be under the illusion that it just came pouring out of someone's head like that. People who are young, or still struggling, can get easily discouraged, because they can't do it like they thought it was done. An artwork is a finished product, and it should be, but I always swore to myself that I would not hide my brushstrokes."