Eight shows a week as Hedda

What a long run does to a part, and the small rituals that get me to curtain up. By week five the lines are in my body, not my head, so the work moves to listening. I arrive at the half with the same flask of ginger tea, run the pistol business twice with the stage manager, and spend the last ten minutes on the floor of the dressing room with my eyes shut. The Thursday matinee is the hardest show of the week and, oddly, often the best. A school group laughed in places nobody had laughed before, and it changed the whole second act.