Hey you, got a problem?

Rehearsals are SLLLLLLOOOOOOOWWWWWW moving events. Do a scene. Do it again. Now a third time, but change it, and remember it, and make it real, too. Yesterday at the Stonington Opera House, director Julia Whitworth was working on the scene in A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM when the four lovers wake up in the wood after all their jumbles have been resolved. The cast, in a sleepy scrum onstage, worked on the scene three times, then Whitworth thought about it and said: "Can we try Option B now?" So they did, and it worked. At least for the moment.

Last night at a party, the Brooklin (Maine) painter Bill Irvine told me he is headed into new territory with his work, new formal problems he wants to explore and solve.

Seems that all art is problem solving. How to get a brush stroke to look like a cloud or a sail boat. How to get an actor from one side of the stage to the other. How to make comedy and tragedy out of meter.

In MIDSUMMER, Theseus, Duke of Athens, puts it this way:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

That is to say: The artist takes that which is "airy nothing" and gives it form. Bill Irvine's paintings. Shakespeare's plays. Actors in character.

"For me, the work of problem solving often is the creation of something beautiful," Whitworth said by phone today. "I'm not a director who plans out in my head how everything will look. I like to trust the process and the people I'm in the room with."

Whitworth's small son was in the background dealing with his own problem solving: how to get Mom off the phone and pay attention to him.

All this meticulous, very hard work takes place so that when we walk in a theater, the plot quickens and the only problems left to solve are our own: Do we believe? Does it take us there? Are we deep in the Athenian woods?

Reminds me of Woody Allen, who said in a recent interview that filmmaking distracts him (and us) "from the uncertainty of life, the inevitability of aging and death and death of loved ones; mass killings and starvation, from holocausts — not just man-made carnage, but the existential position you're in."

Theseus says the same thing: "Is there no play to ease the anguish of the torturing hour?"

But, hee-haw folks, let's not go too deep. Remember, this is a play in which Bottom's head is turned into the head of a donkey -- and he's got no problem at all with it.