Lydia’s Blog

There are plenty of you (okay, well like three) who have been asking why I’ve not been writing the last few months. The answer is this:

I was sort of waiting until I had something witty, appropriately trivial and charmingly self-depricating to expostulate upon. In other words, I was hoping that this pesky cloud of cursed fate-splattered self-loathing would dissipate for long enough for me to write something, well, characteristically cute.

Seeing as that prospect doesn’t even qualify as a speck on the horizon at this point, I’ll just throw something together. Hope it doesn’t spoil any well-deserved office procrastination time you’ve chosen to devote to the Kittensnake.

My favorite tortured decision of the last few years of my adult life has defiantly refused to resolve itself in my frequently alcohol-soaked brain. Should I leave Berlin for Stuttgart?

Well. The decision was made. I now fear that it wasn’t the stifling hierarchy at the Komische Oper that was sucking my will to live…rather…it was assistant directing in general. House assisting, to be specific.

Here they’re called Festregieassistenten. In England they’re called staff directors. In the U.S., they’re called staff ADs. Here is the fun little life paradox endemic in all three forms: When you’re contractually bound to an opera house (and that seal is pretty air-tight), you will invariable receive all forms of offers for really well-paid freelance work elsewhere…all of which you’ll be forced, kicking and screaming, to turn down in favor of the gray, thankless labor expected of your contractual obligation.

The other side of the coin, from what I’ve gathered from some friends who decided to avoid contract-renewal, is that once you’re free of a “fest” (firm) contract, guest work becomes as scarce as heterosexual men at a midnight screening of “Dreamgirls”.

Why bother with a house contract then? Well. Good question. We idealistic jackasses are somehow lead to believe that this particualr form of white slavery will put us in a better position to begin directing our own mainstage work…that we’ll earn, from our blood, sweat and tears, the respect of those in positions of power…so as to eventually make that fairy tale jump from assistant director to just “director”.

Lies, people. All lies.

Sure there are seductive moments. Remounting a show is like a hard narcotic…making you high on responsibility and (loosely interpreted) power…so much that you forget that this particular baby, no matter how cute and roly-poly it is…actually belongs to someone else.

I am actually in the unfortunate postion of having directed quite a bit on my own. University stuff. Offity-off stuff (that was fucking dope and toured the U.S., Europe and Asia, I’ll have you know…) and chamber-mainstage stuff. I am significantly worse off that most in my caste…those that are still waiting for their first shot. I know what it feels like, and oh baby, do I remember…

So here I sit, trying to figure out how I’m supposed to stage two brand-new casts into a questionable production of a certain monster Verdi tragedy I’ve learned from a video, a few reviews and an interview, in three spottily attended weeks with only one chorus rehearsal and no final run-through.

Stuttgart, Berlin, Rovno Gubernya. It’s all the same. I guess in the end my decision didn’t really matter.

The problem for me, I guess, is that I still believe in opera. I still love it more than anything. I still believe it can move and change people when it’s used in the correct way. It’s formal powers are nearly limitless. However, in all these hours of list-writing, rehearsal-plan wrangling, glazed-eyed video parroting and general asshole-licking, I can sense my own wonder and innocence in this entire world drying out and crumbling. The bottom line is this. If I didn’t love opera so much, I’d be a much better assistant. As it is, at best, this is basically a state of suspended animation. Every time I fabricate a smile or nod for some dramaturg’s robotic justification for idiocy…I feel the foundation of my entire personality strain to the point of cracking. Every time some talent-impaired yet up-and-coming young director asks me how I managed to sit out a performance in the Artistic Director’s box wearing a bandana on my head…

Well, I just feel like ditching this shit and going to law school.

Paying one’s dues is a normal part of professional life, one tells oneself constantly. Still, if paying one’s dues becomes tantamount to auto-amputation…can it really be worth it? Can it?

The administration floor in Germany is called the Verwaltungsetage. Verwaltung means administration. One of my charming yet mortifying German mistakes is mixing up the word Verwaltung with Vergewaltigung…which means rape. I’ve been corrected for slipping and saying “Vergewaltigungetage”.

The rape floor. In some existential sense, maybe it’s not really a mistake.

And the melodrama draws to its close. Lydia goes to bed. And goes to work in the morning.

With a smile, however frozen, on her face.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.