Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work

I sat in just the right spot to see all of this. One of the charac-

ters was setting a table—plates, cutlery, and glasses with

stems—while conversing with another character. At a tense

moment in the conversation, the actor setting the table acci-

dentally bumped a glass with the back of her hand, causing it

to tumble onto the seat of a chair, on its way to the floor. Now

obviously this could have been very disruptive. Broken glass all

over the stage; what do you do with that? But she incorporat-

ed it into the performance. The chair had a cushion, so the

glass bounced. She caught the glass mid-bounce and then froze

her gaze on the other character, as ...