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For actors, all actors I dare say, it is a terrific and very fun thing to feel and hear an audience’s positive response .

To know that a comedic line lands where and how it’s supposed to, eliciting laughter, well….it feels good. Matched only by giving an audience a chance to have a good expressive cry, making an audience feel and express anything
is why we do it….sure a paycheck is nice, but then how do you explain the countless people who fill the many stages of local amateur theaters, people as devoted, perhaps even more so than paid professionals, people who are theater actors deep in their souls, and don’t get paid money to do it?

It’s what I call the “blue arc” of emotional and story telling electricity that connects an audience to the performers onstage: humans love and need to connect, to communicate, and since the first prehistoric hunters told stories around the village campfire, mankind has therefore had its tradition of theater.

Those theaters, those “houses”with seats and a stage, are rooms of happiness.

But it’s the room that comes before the stage “room” that is, for me, happiest of all, and that is the rehearsal room.

It’s in the rehearsal hall that the rawest creativity occurs , that creativity that kickstarts the process. It’s in the rehearsal room that there is no wrong, no mistake, for it is all mistakes, until the suitable mix of choices is found. A good well – run rehearsal room is my happiest room. A room of high wire experiments, expressions of a moment, embraces of trust, stubbing one’s toe and living to tell the tale.

The challenges that a new script presents are thrilling, and for actors, each script,old or new, is a fresh place to start. Even if you’ve done the play before, there are always new things to discover. And a brand new script, fresh from the writer’s desk,is an unknown world where horizons seem limitless. A good rehearsal room is pure exhilarating exploration .

Of course, I could say it’s a disciplined exploration, the uncovering of a script in a room full of creative actors, actors devoted to the words on a page, caring for the playwrights intentions, all together striving to make a whole out of pieces hitherto not assembled. But even the rehearsals that feel undisciplined often yield the richest moments of discovery.

I always adored performing, throughout my decades in the profession, but I reiterate: it’s the rehearsal room where I was always happiest. An empty space ( the name actually of the famed Peter Brooks literary valentine to the theater), filled with fresh air, fresh coffee and fresh energies, is a place where anything can happen, and to trust that process throughout a long career, is a delectable, treasured thing.

Where people gather, there is the chance that something will be born that has never existed before because people are inherently creative, constantly sharing new ideas and hopes and wishes, forever solving problems together.
This is a happy thing.
This is the destiny of a rehearsal room.