Headwaters 2008 is a genuine success, with people regularly laughing and crying in the same evening, young people seeing their home town in a different way, and donations for 2009 rolling in.  

The Wednesday, July 9 Friends and Family Preview performance sailed like a dreamship, with truly lovely performances and the magic of a passionate first audience.  Opening night on July 10 was strong but rocky, with a couple of "choke" moments and some creative re-writing on the spot.  Friday the 11th, the company started to find the rhythm of the piece with an audience (and then we had the company party at our house, which was good eats and great fun).

During the day Friday and Saturday Jo Carson, Jerry Grillo (da playwrights), Jerry Stropnicky (director of Headwaters 2009), Lynn Jeffries (designer for Headwaters 2009), and moi (producer of Headwaters 2009), along with Tommy Deadwyler & Terri Edgar (Friday only) – we got to explore ideas and ways of working for next year’s show.  Before the Saturday night performance we had that discussion with the performers as well, and some of the things they said were really useful. 

Things people want to see for Headwaters 2009:

• more costumes
• more puppets
• ghosts
• magic realism
• Cabbage Patch Doll stories
• stories from Andy Allen, the bus driver
• lots of laughter

Lynn Jeffries posed the question: It wouldn’t be Headwaters without…

• the bears
• a sense of place – both the earth and the heritage of the people
• the gym to perform in
• having fun!

I’ll add one more – being innovative.  This community story performance is different from most of the others out there, in part because our audience is sophisticated and willing to engage with difficult and potentially controversial stories, and we have community story performers with "chops" (skills and talent).  That’s unusual – Jerry Stropnicky pointed that out as we ate lunch on the porch of the Sautee Market, when Jo asked about what kind of artistic risks we might take next year.  Because we can.

We’ve taken lots of artistic risks with the first iteration of Headwaters: I daresay we’re the only community story performance in Georgia using aerial silks to tell our stories.  And we’re likely to be alone in our use of multiple forms of puppetry, in this genre.  I don’t think the Center for Puppetry Arts has devised a community performance in this vein, but that would be a fun conversation to have.

On Sunday, the production team for 2009 finished up over brunch at our house – MK Wegmann, my esteemed girlfriend, is a champion cook – and mapped out a schedule for next year.  Script by December, readings and design and talent inventory in February/March, rehearsals after Memorial Day.  Opening: July 9, 2009.

The final show of the weekend was the Sunday matinee, in yet another downpour.  [Side note: on Friday morning I visited radio host Dean Dyer on WRWH in Cleveland, and he informed me and the listening audience that Sautee had had 4.5 inches of rain as of Friday morning.  I bet it's 6 inches by now.]  The show’s now pretty solid, people know what it will do, and how to work it.  Strange things will continue to happen, but every time you perform in front of an audience your ability to handle that increases.

My friend Linda Burnham, co-proprietor of www.communityarts.net came with a friend – all the way from Saxapahaw, North Carolina – to see the Sunday performance.  Over dinner afterwards, I asked her where she thought this play stood in the rankings of community story performances she had seen, on a scale of one to ten.  "Just less than 10" she said.  And assured me it wasn’t because we were feeding her spicy crawfish etouffee at that moment.

Weekend two of the run (and Tommy D’s birthday) will go on without me.  I’ll be back for the closing weekend – including a stint in the band.

Onward, as ever! 

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