The shifting point...

Something begins and we know it will last for a certain period of time: a play, the seasons, a year of school, a day, a relationship, a directors' laboratory.

About half-way through, aware or unaware, something changes by measuring the beginning against the potentiality of the ending. After this point, one's experience stops leading directly to an expected point, but begins to move outward in many directions, and the possibility of meaning begins to crowd its way in and mix with the present and the past.

"Sleep, that knits up the raveled sleeve of care..." Dreams are the denouements of days, and the dreamer is the protagonist of larger life unfolding...

In conversation in the east village tonight with fellow LCT Directors Lab members, a period of evaluation began and turned from speculation and criticism into a question "What really makes for a good director's lab?" It was revealed as an earnest question by way of a moment of honesty in the face of challenge.

It is an open question because it is about the future: the Lab is no longer about the experience we have had or are having, except as exposition and the playing out of a particular conflict for each and all of us. Just as the question of Macbeth shifts away from a plot about a criminal and sinful usurpation toward an evocation of the existential nature of life's value, the question posed above leads inevitably toward another one: "What will the future of collaboration in the American theater be?" This larger question reflects personal and group struggles with all the features of a layered drama: economics, power, identity, personal agendas, culture, generations, the shifting of truth and perception from one person to another and one time frame to another -- and, in this case, the ability of those in the theater to learn from the theater on levels surpassing the realms of their own ideas.

And just like a good theatrical experience, while it may be profoundly true that we are always each at the center of our own universe, there is also a universe of others.