Pie Crust / Previews

What is a preview performance? And how’s it different from opening night? And why is it important? We get these questions all the time at 4th Wall. Previews can be a little confusing, so I’ll write about them in the language of the Thanksgiving season: pie.

Pie is my contribution to the Thanksgiving table. This year I’m celebrating the basics with a pie trifecta: pumpkin, chocolate meringue, and pecan.

I’ve learned from doing that if I want not just a delicious pie, but a pretty pie, I have to operate more professionally. To form a neat crust, you need a neat circle of dough, and the nature of a shaggy pie dough is that it is stubbornly resistant to Euclidean geometry. So on Thanksgiving, when my competitive streak comes out because I know my brother-in-law will also be serving a pie, I increase the dough recipe by 10% to give myself the margin I need to neatly trim some away. (Shh - don’t tell him.)

I learned to bake pie from my grandma. She was an amateur baker in the truest and most beautiful sense of the word - she did it for the love of baking, and for the love of her family. She would bristle at the thought of wasting food. She was one generation removed from the Great Depression and firmly in the camp of “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” She would scrape mixing bowls so clean that I wondered if we really needed to wash them.  

The shift from amateurism to professionalism is the recognition that trimmed off dough in pursuit of excellence is not waste, it is the final and necessary ingredient for greatness.

(Am I bragging on my beautiful Thanksgiving pie crust? Yes, shamelessly.)

Producing a play is like baking a pie. Disparate elements must come together to serve the whole, it’s time and labor intensive, the result is something that should be shared with a crowd. Best case scenario, it’s beautiful, delicious, greater than the sum of its parts, and has an all-too-short shelf life. Pies and plays are both celebrations of people and of a moment in time.

To extend the metaphor, if baking a pie is like producing a play, then the trimmed off dough is kind of like the preview performances.

Professional theatres have “preview” performances before officially “opening” a show because we understand that the final shaping of a live performance can only happen with a live audience. Previews are the director’s final opportunity to make changes in response to live dynamics. A director may ask an actor or designer to do something differently based on a preview audience reaction (or lack thereof). Practically speaking, we usually discount preview performances, we don’t advertise them as widely, and we do not invite members of the press. The audience member at a preview performance is a very special arts patron. They are the final and necessary ingredient for greatness.

So when we plan a theatre season (when we prepare a crust), we schedule preview performances (we allocate sufficient dough) so that the final product is both delicious and professional for all to share.

Easy as pie?

Happy Thanksgiving.