creating a/broad, April 6, 2013

Hell Week
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

Oh, lord. I look back on what I wrote last week, about the value of stillness and intention. All of that remains true, but let’s be honest, it was the calm before the storm, the calm before the tornado. I don’t have time for that shit. I don’t even have time to write this column. I am going into tech week. 

Tech week: the week before a show opens. Even if a show has next-to-no tech, even if tech is 30 minutes before house opens, every company I’ve ever seen kinda blocks the week before out for Hell Week. It’s a standard reference throughout the English-speaking theater world, isn’t it? Tech week, that rhymes with “heck”, which starts with H, which stands for Hell, my friends, yes, now you know what I’m talking about, now you know what is happening in my life. It’s Hell Week.

Baseline level of “smoothly” is no one has died (knock wood) or injured themselves (knock wood).

There was a small counter-movement afoot, in one of the places where I performed, not to call this week “Hell Week”. People there felt like it was a self-fulfilling prophecy and not very positive. I get where they’re coming from, but it’ll always be Hell Week to me, no matter how smoothly it goes.

Baseline level of “smoothly” is no one has died (knock wood) or injured themselves (knock wood). I mean, a one-person show doesn’t have the same capacity for personal or interpersonal disaster to take its toll, so odds are good that it will go smoothly. But similarly, a one-person show can be taken down by one single disaster happening to the wrong person at the right time (triple-knock-wood-until-I-get-splinters).

The hell part of it isn’t the disaster, the hurricanes or car crashes or student demonstrations. Those are Acts of God, or at least a god, maybe not a merciful one, maybe a committee of indifferent gods, but by definition such acts are so extraordinary that you couldn’t see them coming. No. The hell of Hell Week consists of things that you did see coming, but they’re so, well, not extraordinary—I guess that makes them ordinary—so mundane that they kinda slipped off the radar. Programs, pre-show music, choosing costumes, finding prop pieces that you just had a substitute in your bag and never bothered getting a new one for the show. Facebook event listings, pushing those out. All of that stuff. Sometimes we remembered from the last Hell Week we went through. Many times we forgot something new, and add it to our list of things to remember for next time.

Hell Week is when I have to keep stepping bravely forward into it and get right the fuck off book

Hell Week is feeling like I’ve got it, and then having a rehearsal where OH GOD I don’t have it, and then another one where it’s like that earlier one didn’t happen and I’ve nailed it and I’m not certain what level anymore I should be worried about the show, but the default is KEEP WORRYING, keep running those lines in the shower, doing dishes, driving to rehearsal, keep worrying until about three hours before and then, welp, either you have it or you don’t.

Hell Week for me is a distillation of all the hell moments in the two months leading up to it, where I don’t know what my blocking is, or subconsciously I do know, but my conscious mind keeps stepping in the way. Hell Week is when I have to keep stepping bravely forward into it and get right the fuck off book, no more calls for lines, the way it comes out needs to be brave and strong and true, in preparation for that inevitable moment in some show, somewhere, where I’ve lost the line and there’s no getting it back, and I just have to act like whatever comes out of my mouth is the way it was meant to be.

You know, if you’ve been following this column long enough, that I have multiple shows at various stages of production.

Since I’m a self-produced act—don’t have a manager, yet, or a producer, yet, or a PR assistant, yet—Hell Week means I get to wear my producer hat, which is two sizes too small and screwed on way too tight. It’s giving me a headache, but that’s the way it goes, counting up RSVPs on Facebook and dividing by 10, yeah, that’s the actual amount you can count on, resisting the urge to contact the box office and ask, so how many pre-sold do we have? Resisting that urge, because I know damn well I am not going to like the answer, that at this stage of the game, even a few days before, pre-sold doesn’t mean a damn thing.

That’s just one show. You know, if you’ve been following this column long enough, that I have multiple shows at various stages of production. Some remain to be scheduled, some need the press releases sent out yesterday, some are waiting for the posters, some are languishing in email and I can’t reasonably email anymore to follow up, but dammit, I need to buy my plane ticket soon, so can I get a London, UK, gig scheduled or what? These shows will all have their own special hell weeks, I have no doubt of that; right now they are just sloppy annoying layers of shit filling in a full-out triple-decker hell cake. Yes. Nothing tastes as bad as Hell Week feels. 

The only thing that makes it possible for me to plow through is experience; I remember what happens afterward, how good it can be. Switching metaphors, I’ve heard that women release hormones after childbirth that kinda soften the memory of all the wrenching pain of labor. They fall so in love with their baby that they forgot how shitty the pushing felt. It’s a little like that. I hope. I always hope.

Release runs from April 9-13 at Mainline Theatre in Montreal
Phone Whore will be performed in Peterborough, Ontario April 18-20
camerynmoore.com