Tech Log at the End of Time: Intro

I'm wading through the murk of every actor's dread, tech. The part of the process where all the actors, designers and crew cobble the show's elements together on stage, line up the angles and then smack it over and over again until it sparks and starts moving and looks like a real play.

It's a long, exhausting process that manages to wed deep tedium and intense pressure in an alchemical fireburst that's hard to explain to the uninitiated. I can't really know how it feels to be in a firefight with bullets chipping my eroding cover, or to dig into someone's arterial system knowing a mistake could wink out their life. But I've read and watched enough reports and dramatizations to at least have something of an idea.

This is, of course, the drying rack where the bold trawlers who brave the elements to reel in precious Lightfish hang their catch.

There aren't a lot of accounts of what going through tech in a stage play is like, to my knowledge. Besides, I need to keep writing this blog and tech is my life right now, so it's sort of the obligatory subject matter. But this is a blog about weird stuff and the imagination, so my report won't be a straight account of the events and the process. Rather, it'll be a whimsical science fictional attempt to capture what being in a theater all day and all night feels like as a show coalesces; that is, it feels like floating in a pre-universal void as a new universe is chipped into being out of the darkness.

As always, thanks for reading. If you need me, I'll be standing backstage in the dark trying not to go nuts.