Twenty some years writing and making plays and I heard something yesterday for the first time, she went up. During a preview, an actor forgot a line and we all just sort of sat there waiting, in a moment that felt like 400 years for me and about three seconds to everyone else. It’s normal and human and happens all of the time, especially to me in my frequent nightmare in which I have to perform my own play and not only am I self conscious of my own play and worried that it’s bad, I ALSO don’t remember any of it. She went up, and then HE went up. Everyone went up. I love this phrase that we’ve found to capture the exact thing that happens when actors remember for a moment that they’re pretending and that there are people watching them pretend. Because that’s exactly where I imagine an actor goes, in these moments, Up and out of their body, Up and into the rest of their actual life, wondering what’s for dinner later, remembering what swim lessons used to smell like, wondering if they said the right thing earlier, and if caterpillars have eyes, and then crashing back down into the character, and into the moment, and into the play. We all go Up. I am in fact, a little bit Up, right now.