GrooveLily

Val said it yesterday morning before I drove up here: I can’t believe that people are paying us actual money to write and perform a show about *us*. An autobiographical show. It blows my mind. Doesn’t matter that this show has been in the works since 2005. It’s ACTUALLY HAPPENING.

Now, keep in mind–this show takes the reality of our lives and plays with it a great deal to make it more dramatically interesting–and all of our foibles are turned up to “11″ so that we become INFINITELY more dramatic than we actually are in real life. But by doing so, I think we get to the heart of who we really were during those heady days when we made the exciting mistake of moving into a used RV.

After a “let’s rip each moment apart as we reread the script again” festival, which we seem to do every time we get together, our scenic designer, Kate Edmunds, and our assistant properties master, Shay Henley, walked us through a bunch of proppy and setty stuff. There’s a scene early on where Val “plays” the touch-tones of a phone, while I type on a very clacky computer keyboard and Gene “plays” staplers and various office supplies, and we got to go hands-on with a bunch of potential choices.

These are instruments.

Percussion instruments.

What is that thing? The one that's been painted black?

Also, an old cell phone plays a very important role in the show, so Gene tried out a number of cell phones to see which felt the most “wildly hip 12 years ago” from the batch that the TheatreWorks prop department had on hand.

Something like this.

Val is starting to vlog about her experiences prepping for Wheelhouse. Here’s her first entry: