As beautiful as you

One month until opening night

When was the last time the blood froze in your veins?

When you opened the mailbox to find a jury summons? When you stepped on the scales in your doctor’s office? When you got back to your car to find a ticket under the wiper? When your latest rates bill arrived (this one for Wellington readers. What did we do to deserve this)?

Or, like me, was it when you were invited to view sales information by the theatre employing you to sell out a show, and the software flashed up rows and rows of available seats? I mean, several dates were filling up fast. Opening night was doing brisk trade. You were told this percentage is entirely normal at this point of the cycle. Yet you couldn’t help but fixate on the little white squares denoting seats, laid out in sections as they are in reality, with no bottoms on them.

ICE IN VEINS.

There’s still time, I told myself after the meeting, driving distractedly all over the place like a mayfly with a Toyota. There’s a whole month left to go.

Nothing concentrates the mind like the vision of personal failure, and mine came courtesy of audience-tracking software (it will HAUNT my DREAMS). This is why I spent yesterday - potentially the last balmy Saturday of the season, with Wellington harbour a millpond, the sea a shining strip, and the South Island as close as I’ve ever seen it - driving between retirement villages with a tote bag full of show posters and flyers. The tote had a pug on it, which I hoped seemed professional.

I wasn’t sure how welcome I’d be at the villages, lugging unsolicited advertising, so for the first few I took my husband and children as human shields. We also had the dog in the back. Near the entry to the first village there was a Watch for Elderly sign and another saying: No Dogs.

Without exception, each village was a model of tasteful landscaping. There were lovely touches, like avenues of cherry trees, tranquil lakes, identical mailboxes on ornate posts, Italianate fountains, benches, and tiny roundabouts, like flowery buttons. There were planters and recreation centres and pools and croquet lawns and discreet hospital blocks among the villas and units. Above all, every village was pin-drop quiet.

“Where is everybody?” asked George, as we circled one village, unable to find Reception. It was deserted.

“Well, there’s one guy behind me,” my husband said, eyeing the mirror. And indeed, a resident was absolutely monstering our bumper, whirring at speed on one of those motorised chairs with a flag waving angrily at the back. We pulled over to let him rip past, and George and I got out to find Reception on foot. George had the hiccups, and each one sounded like a sonic boom.

After a bit, we managed to find Reception and were graciously invited to leave a single poster. (A SINGLE POSTER.) At this moment we found out where everybody was. Through a glass double-door, we looked into an airy common room and there must have been over a hundred people, closer to the end of their lives than the beginning, listening with deep pleasure to a young choir singing Starry Night. The lyrics followed us back into the sunshine

I could’ve told you, Vincent

This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you

I’m not embarrassed to tell you I found this profound. I felt suddenly sad. I wanted to stay inside this feeling and properly experience it and I would have, if it wasn’t for George’s bloody hiccups and the dog, gazing at me from the car with a GET ME OUT OF HERE expression.

I’ve never known a dog so unwilling to deliver flyers

Halfway through my paper round, I switched teams. My mum came with me for the latter four villages. Partly the dog needed walking, and partly Maddie was furious I’d stealth-bombed a rec room noticeboard and put up a poster without permission. (Nobody was around to ask. NOBODY. Believe me, I tried.)

Mum and I glided in her car through a large, well-appointed village whose front gates were garlanded with brilliant red flowers. When we got out at the main block, the air was rich with the smell of casserole. I believe it was beef. Definitely onions, and a good stock. Again, it was uniformly peaceful among the tiny, well-tended villas.

More worrying was the sight of an ambulance parked outside the doors. Mum and I inched inside the building and nearly collided with two paramedics, manoeuvring a stretcher on wheels. The stretcher was empty except for a blinking digital machine - probably a defibrillator. The paramedics looked the way I might feel after responding to a false alarm - satisfied about being of service, but a tiny bit deflated as well.

It felt odd to visit a village within a village. When we left the gates and turned into the wider suburbs, all the houses felt pointlessly enormous.

Our final stop was to a rest home facing the beach. I fanned out the flyers at Reception, at the invitation of a nurse; as we went back to the car, we noticed three residents sitting companionably facing the sea. One had parked her walking frame beside their bench, her difficult mobility briefly forgotten. The friends were gazing directly southwest at the crisp outline of Te Waipounamu, the tiny fishing boats, and the glittering surface of the Tasman Sea.

“You’ve a lovely spot there,” remarked Mum.

“We really do,” they smiled back.

This was a perfect moment to for us to leave the parked car and go for a walk together along the sand. I’d seen a lot of elderly people today, people without my relative youth and good health. I was running around with my pug bag when really, how many more warm autumn Saturdays might be left to enjoy before the clocks change, dragging us into winter?

But Mum and I didn’t have time, it would have to wait, there were so many jobs left to do.

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Rehearsals began this week, and I joined the group for our first production meeting as a cooperative. Our five cast; our director, musical director and producer; our costume and set designer, the sound and lighting team, the stage manager and choreographer. We are in every sense a team with our own, unique positions, ranging around the paddock and ready for the whistle.

The charm of Circa Theatre is undeniable. I haven’t even been inside Circa One since getting the job. It’s the larger of two theatres and will be where Give Way is staged, but has been occupied in the past month by three earlier productions (the current one is Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit). We have to wait our turn before getting in there, so our home for now is a rehearsal room upstairs.

First up at our meeting was a reveal of the set design. For now, it exists as a miniature model, an idea in 3D; everyone reacted as though this was very routine, to be shown in advance a scaled-down mock-up of the stage. Frankly it took everything I had not to squeak or flap my hands when Tony placed it in front of our circle of chairs and removed its little ceiling.

It was ingenious. He’d envisaged large panels featuring NZ road rules, arranged around a circular raised stage; above the actors would hang a central traffic light feature, implying intersections. There were teensy road cones and moveable furniture. The scale model even featured Hayden, our Music Director and keyboardist, rendered in stiff paper.

Tony De Goldi’s ingenious Give Way set design, in model form

Tony also talked everyone through the costumes he’d designed - multiple changes for four of the actors, who are playing varied roles. The wings will be a blur each night of actors quickly swapping pants for skirts, tossing away hats and shrugging off jackets. Every visual detail is justified. Nothing happens by accident at this point; everything is carefully considered, agreed by all, and recorded in a daily rehearsal report. Just thinking about it makes me feel swoony all over again, for THE THEATRE.

Later I’d have a meeting downstairs as the cast thumped in the overhead rehearsal room, doing what’s called ‘a stumble-through’ of everything they’ve blocked and practised so far. The muffled sound of footfalls, and piano music as you walk up the stairs; those are the sounds I’ll remember of the first week of rehearsal.

I also had a snoop around the Green Room, dressing rooms and the theatre’s own laundry, while I was between meetings. The Green Room is everything you’d hope an actors’ lounge would be. Comfortable and well-worn. Among mismatched chairs, there’s a battered leather Chesterfield you can sink deeply into and watch the busy waterfront below; framed show posters on the walls, and a newspaper left open, you’d imagine, to last night’s review.

The dressing rooms are either occupied and their doors closed, with actors’ names taped on them (rather thrillingly, GINETTE MCDONALD), or empty and stark, but any room becomes warmly alive when you switch on all the bulbs around a mirror. The laundry shelves are packed with labelled boxes (BUTTONS, RIBBONS, ZIPS); there’s an ironing board always at the ready, washing machines, a hanging row of blazers, and emergency pairs of shoes.

In the hall this week were zip-bags of costumes, presumably to be taken back into storage. In which other workplace might you find an Anzac soldier’s hat, a goose outfit, or a clear plastic bag of giant, padded hands?

Good grief, I’m giving this all I have. What fascinating people. What a strangely magical subculture they occupy. How lucky I am to be spending these weeks in their world.