The Road to Boston
I suppose they call it a MegaBus because it’s allowing me to sit in a seat on it’s second story, laptop on my lap (plugged in and charging!), and connected to the internet so that I can write a blog posting. If that’s not Mega, then I assume there’s some other bus out there with a self-cleaning, heated-seat, solid gold toilet and if there is I look forward to pooping in it. Until then, this excellent MegaBus will serve as Libby, Rachel, Mikaal, Heather, Amber and I travel to Boston to join the rest of the Mission Drift team who made the trip yesterday – and prepare to tech and preview the show at Emerson University. We have spent the past three weeks and several hundred draft pages at our home space in Crown Heights chiseling the dialogue, crafting the scenes, dancing the dances and singing and re-singing the sweet, sweet songs. Tomorrow morning we will arrive on the set that the excellent folks at Emerson have built for us, and we will start to let the pretty pink snow fall. Then after our extra special one-night-only preview performance next week, we will pack the set up and slowboat it across the Atlantic so it will be there for us when we start our European tour in July.
The creation and gestation of Mission Drift has been a long and interesting one. Creating a play about capitalism and the American appetite during these particular years has left us no shortage of fascinating and pertinent real life stories to examine and bewildering research to pour through. This process has had its ups and downs for me, for us all, but when we finished our final run through of the show in Crown Heights last night before hitting the road today, I felt a kind of total-body inspiration from the experience and awe at my insanely talented collaborators. As I walked through Brooklyn, a matter of blocks from where Libby’s and my characters, Joris and Catalina Rapalje, lived 400 years ago, I had a feeling like we might really have hit something special here. And as I ride a MegaBus from the tip of New Amsterdam to the heart of New England, I am so grateful to be putting on a play that seeks to tell a story of America.
– B Hastert