Jim Panttaja

Every night is special at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It may be a preview, an opening, there is an understudy performing, it is raining in the outdoor theater, and so on. Last night was the closing night of the Pulitzer Prize winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire, Rabbit Hole.

I had been warned that this was a three hankie play. I don’t want to say too much about the play itself, because I think it is best viewed not knowing exactly where it is going. My daughter’s boyfriend, Tom had seen the play before and said that this play is best viewed the first time (though he liked this production).

In Illuminations (a publication of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival), there is an interview with David Lindsay-Abaire where he says that when he was at Julliard, he was told to write about the thing that most frightens him. The play is about a family coping (and not coping) with the death of a child. He (and this production) create for us the very different and very real lives that this incident created for each of the people around the child. Each person is coping in their own way. Each is affected in a different way. And they can’t (and fortunately don’t have to) play out their part alone. I think that is why I didn’t find myself reaching for my hankie (though there were certainly tears several times). Everyone realized that they couldn’t work through their pain by themselves - and couldn’t work through it only in way they wanted to.

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One of the things that I found special about the evening, was that even though is was closing night for this play, there was nothing about the performance that felt out of the ordinary. It was probably like the many other performances of the four months of this show. Except I think I noticed Bill Geisslinger take an extra look around the stage before he walked off after the curtain call.

We often watch people concentrating their debugging or problem solving in one area. It is the old joke depicted in the image below. You walk up to someone looking for their key. After helping them for awhile, you start asking a few questions - finally asking  how they lost the key, or where they lost the key. The answer is “over there”. You then ask the obvious question - “If you dropped it over there, why are you looking for it here?”. They answer “Because the light is better”.

Sometimes you are looking at one piece of your code, or your process, because you know that part best - not because it is the likely source (no pun intended) of the problem. You need to look other places. Maybe look at the place you understand the least. Maybe look at the piece of code that you hate to look in (maybe there is a reason you don’t like to go there). Maybe you should spawn some agents.

[The cartoons were done for us several years ago by Marc Schmid. His website is www.cartooncity.net ]