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And now it’s on to Boston!

We’ve been rehearsing for Heartland at ART’s Emerging America Festival.  Watching the video of the piece from Toronto I was struck by how different we all look.  I guess just younger, but also different somehow . . .

It is wonderful to be revisiting this play.  The themes we were grappling with then seem just as relevant now as they did in 2005 – same war, same red state blue state divide (which Rachel Shukert who worked on Heartland in London at it’s earliest stages and who is from Omaha insisted back then was actually a urban/rural divide).  Some of my lines as Bobby Kennedy have taken on a different meaning after the death of Edward.

We’ve changed the last lines of the Christmas Carol sequence.  We’ve changed those lines literally every time we’ve put the play up, which feels fitting considering that the first part of Heartland that we ever put on its feet was the Christmas Carol section for Rachel’s Grad Directing class with Anne Bogart.

And now it’s on to Boston! (where I’ll probably get tomato-ed for my Bobby Kennedy accent)

-Jake