Living In The Present Tense

Honestly, I shouldn't have picked this play. Not because it's a bad script - far from it. It's just that reading Living In The Present Tense by ian pierce is a profoundly strange experience of cognitive dissonance. I can't write about this script as a script because I can't step back far enough from that strangeness. "Cognitive dissonance" is the experience of holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously, so I suppose it's not quite the right word. I'm holding two contradictory timelines simultaneously.

I know this cast and creative team intimately. Or, rather, knew. These are all folks I worked with, and then separated from when I left Chicago. Theatre's odd like that (Anne Bogart talkes a bit about it here): we form these incredibly tight relationships, when then can become so transitory when we move on to the next show or next town. This is a play done by my theater family, and I can't help but see that alternate timeline where I'm not simply reading this script but am a part of it. Hence the cognitive temporal dissonance. I know this script almost as well as if I'd been there, but I'm also coming at it completely fresh and unawares.

This script - more than any this year - proves that a published playscript is a piece of amber, fossilizing and preserving the living contents it describes. It is a snapshot of a moment in time, the remains of an ephemeral event. I can almost see this production, hear every word, see each movement clearer than if I was watching a videotape of the proceedings.