Monthly Archives: September 2007

directing

what’s your deal

I’ve had several people mention to me now that I’ve assisted a lot of different artists, and that the shows I’ve worked on don’t always seem to match up with the kinds of plays I choose to direct myself. It’s true.

When I’m directing, I tend to gravitate towards, you know, choruses, rhyme, the macabre. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a hell of a lot to learn from working on Moliere, Shakespeare, a one-woman show about Golda Meir, a new play, an adaptation – all that and more.

I think it’s my own graduate school, this year of assisting on productions that are unlike my own. In a way, I think I’ve sought out things I couldn’t have imagined directing myself.

It’s like the exercise of making yourself write a poem in a style you’d never use. The exercise is going to teach you things about both that style and your own, much more than you’d learn from just writing in the style with which you’re already comfortable.

(revision of post prompted by the law of shorter paragraphs on the internet)

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directing, Golda

asking nicely

When do characters come out of their shells, and why? What makes the actor hear those voices? How do you trust that they will come? It’s not so different from writing.
What makes us free to play and not to doubt ourselves?
What gives us the permission to “fake it till you make it” and put in placeholders for what we trust will be more complete characterizations?
What lets us do our work?

I think that the answer to all of this is in the level of safety engendered in the room by the artists. (Mere and I were just talking about differences in management styles and work environments, and how drastically those differences affect people’s work.)

Sure, there are different levels of technique. But if the place in which that technique has to work isn’t safe and consistent – if you don’t show up every day, and show up with patience and compassion – the characters may never choose to come out at all.

Lots of faith. And making the room a safe place.

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a propos of nothing

And she named them all Dave

I’m in SF with Mere tonight, which seems to be the only time I get any work done. We ate Vietnamese vegetarian pancakes, which are like omelets full of bean sprouts, and lemongrass tofu and spicy eggplant with basil. Mere’s friend was a bean sprout farmer in Maui. Typing, writing, catching up on old notes and such. Here’s another Yiddish curse:

Hindert hayzer zol er hobn, in yeder hoyz a hindert tsimern, in yeder tsimer tsvonsik betn un kadukhes zol im varfn fin eyn bet in der tsveyter.
A hundred houses shall he have, in every house a hundred rooms and in every room twenty beds, and a delirious fever should drive him from bed to bed.

It reminds me of THE RED DEATH, and also of my brain.

Q: How do you keep it all in your head?
A: Keep what?

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Golda

Communication…

As we began our third week, Aaron and Camille had a conversation in rehearsal yesterday about styles of communicating. It just took a moment out of our rehearsal day but it was so valuable, in terms of the understanding it brought to the work. (Aaron says that theater artists are professional communicators. Or should be.) They have a great working relationship, and a lot of respect for one another.

We worked through the first 10 pages of the play, with Aaron giving lots of notes and then with Camille going back and incorporating them in a larger run. Their goal was to have Camille connecting with the text strongly. Our blocking skeleton is mostly holding up under this more intense work.

As for the characters, we are experimenting with Camille using less of a defined national accent and more of a character’s personality. We’re dropping many of the one-liner voices. It seems to be working well.

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the chorus

Chorus-ography

Jessica called me last night, and we talked about the possibility of adding an improvised chorus into existing pieces of choreography – combining blocking for some characters with improv for others.  If this works, it would make it much more possible to use the method in different scenarios.

Anyone have an opinion about “spontaneous chorus” as a term? “Free radical chorus” hasn’t stuck with me – I keep going back to “improvised chorus” – but Portland liked “spontaneous.”

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Golda

End of 2nd week

We had a run-through yesterday and one today, with designers present. Both went really well. I think I’m starting to get the rhythm of these rehearsals.

Eating dinner with Alice, Melissa, and Shiyan. Last night we had dinner at Rogue Chefs in Half Moon Bay for Mere’s birthday.  It’s been a very culinary Menlo couple of days.

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Golda

Process, Process

I emailed Aaron about his decision to move into more specific character work after our first block-through, and he told me he’d had some idea of doing that all along, but it became more specific in response to the text. He finds the text to be very “playable” and open to many layers of detail.

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