On one of my last days of the residency, I visited with Sam Levy and Thom Clay, lovely familiar faces from the Summer Play Festival. It was great to see them again.

And then the day arrived for the reading. Oddly enough, I wasn’t all that nervous. I only had a chance to spend an hour at the full rehearsal day, but I could tell I was in good hands with my director, Abbey Wright, and with the cast that had been assembled by Anne McNulty and Vicky Richardson, of the Donmar Warehouse. All of the actors were British, but their American accents were very good.

The day I arrived, I unpacked at the beautiful apartment Miriam had booked for me near Bryanston Square. It was lovely and posh, and when I told the caretaker it was beautiful, he said he figured I would say it was cute, being American. “No, it’s lovely,” I said. And he said, “Good. I hate the word ‘cute.’ (Note to self: erase ‘cute’ from vocabulary for next twelve days.)”

I hit the ground running. Miriam had booked a play for me to see that evening Dimetos at the Donmar Warehouse. She apologized and said if I was tired it would be fine for me to miss the play. I decided it would be best to just push. I’m glad I did. It was amazing.

When I found out shortly after the close of the 2008 Summer Play Festival I was going to get to go to London on a theatre residency with the Donmar Warehouse, my initial reaction was typical for me - panic. I wasn’t even sure what a residency was, and what one did when on a residency, but of course I said yes to James Bierman, the Donmarís executive producer. I’d love to come to London, and thank you very much.

After several emails and discussions about when the residency would begin, we decided on May 4th. It would be a two-week residency, culminating in a reading of my SPF play, The Ones That Flutter, at the Wyndhams Theatre on May 15th.

Take a look at the video below from my trip to Germany!