I am excited about seeing People Talking and Singing tonight. I am excited about seeing “Awesome“‘s pared-down version of noSIGNAL tomorrow. But I’m especially excited to see Museum Play at WET on Sunday. Here’s why: It’ll be the first play of their new season and their last season opener was Crave, which was a hypnotic nightmare. Museum Play has a young playwright (Jordan Harrison, originally from around here), a good director (Marya Sea Kaminksi), good actors (Lathrop Walker, Elise Hunt, et al), and Jennifer Zeyl for a set designer.

I got to see a little bit of the set the other night: I met Zeyl, this year’s Theater Genius (and daughter of Donald Zeyl, Ph.D. of classical philosophy at Harvard, lecturer at Brown and professor at University of Rhode Island, and Plato translator for Hackett, one of the best humanities publishing houses in the world), at her apartment for a drink. I had Scotch. She had gin and juice. We talked about her dog, her boyfriend, sets, theaters, directors Friesland, siblings, religion, and, a few drinks later, tottered down to the Washington Ensemble Theater on 19th to see how the set-building for Museum Play was coming along.

It was a jumble of tools, props, and museumy things: Bones, butterflies and moths, netting, and a false ceiling that stretched out over the fourth row. There were a dozen people in various states of busyness—actors sawing, the director talking about lights, the lighting designer talking about lamps (“Do you have a two-foot-tall lamp?â€� Zeyl turned and asked), someone cutting holes in the ceiling for some kind of puppetry, someone adjusting a skull hanging on a wall, knocking over some postcards. A long, dusty stuffed bird stretched over three seats. Someone said to watch out for the delicate, dried crab on the stage. Someone else went for a beer run. Everyone was in for the long haul and everyone was surprisingly not-panicked for a play that would open in two nights.

“I want the scooter to stand up,” Zeyl said to Allen Johnson (yes, that Allen Johnson) who was helping.
“I could go to the Depot tomorrow and get some casters,” he said.
“Casters? I got casters! An ass-load of casters!” She dug around in a plastic box, picking up, examining, and discarding broad plastic wheels.
Johnson turned to me: “This is great. This is keeping me out of trouble. And of course I’m going to stay all night. Because why not?â€�

Someone handed me a bottle of superglue, some plastic insects, and mounting to glue them onto. “Look out, Ema got her fingers stuck together for hours last week.” I opened a beer, tried to be careful, and got to work.