Thursday, November 6, 2008

Playreading group

Last night I went to a wonderful thing - a young American director here in town wanted to get together a group of people to read plays together. We'd been corresponding about this for a couple of weeks and last night was our first meeting.

I should say that first of all, I was a little skeptical because while I want to meet people and do things, I really would like to be doing things in German here in Berlin, or failing that, in Spanish or French, things I couldn't do in Bloomington! In addition, yesterday I was so wiped out from the lack of sleep from watching elections that I couldn't quite imagine going.

But it was wonderful! We read Sophocles' Antigone, there were five of us (all women last night; supposed to be more people coming in the future, also from that other gender), and it was great. Fun to be with these women, to talk, to have a common project. It's a great play. But don't sit down and read it to yourself, get a group of friends together and pass out the roles.

Best of all, these people want to get together and do this once a week! (Hubby asked, are you going to do Antigone every week? The answer is no, a different play every week.) I'm thrilled. You viewers back home will think aha, she is trying to recreate the wonderful Bloomington women's group which met every Thursday night for so many years; and no, but yes. No because it is a very different project, but yes because the meeting once a week with a common project is a great thing. It'll be so interesting to see whether the introduction of male people next week or later makes a big difference to me or not; whether the whole woman-group thing I cherish depends on it just being women, or not.

When I first got there there were 2 other women; each of them less than half my age. The others who were came were a little less young I guess. We brought food, we ate it, we read the play (truly a very good play), we talked about it, we wandered around the big huge apartment our hostess is housesitting. What can I tell you? 

I'm very happy about this group. Can you tell?

1 comment:

elena said...

This sounds great – I'm very happy for you and hope that when you come back to Bloomington you can jump start such a group here. A terrific idea! Hope you'll keep us posted on this as it develops.