So, more exercises today, in what was a day of table work bristling with energy. We’re on our third and final day of discussion. Tomorrow will be fittings and a readthrough.

First was a free writing exercise, with about a minute on each question:
1) Your character’s favorite foods
2) Relationship to God
3) Reading materials
4) Describe your best friend. If you don’t have one at the time the play takes place, describe someone from the past.
5) Favorite extracurricular activities, whatever that means to you.
6) Where do you see yourself ten years from now?

As we do these writing exercises, I’ve been answering them as if I was my own character. It’s interesting how hard it is to answer simple questions about yourself. Sometimes in the interest of staging a play, we get closer to a fictional being than we ever do to our own selves.

Then the director placed the seven actors in their primary character relationships: the mother and father, the lovers, and the brain-damaged woman, her caretaker, and the boy who loves the caretaker. Then she gave these instructions:

1) Hold out your hands.
2) Look carefully at the front and back of your partner’s hands. Memorize them.
3) Close your eyes and memorize the hands by touch.

Then she spread them out around the room, had them close their eyes, and find the partners again, just by touching hands. They did it amazingly quickly. One of the actors commented on how the sense of temperature was the most vital.

We all know the body temperature of the people whose hands we actually hold – who we sleep with, who we bathe or take to school or dress and undress. To bring that knowledge into the rehearsal room made the relationships much more physical.