Back from Xmas, and we’re working through the second act of the play, for the second time. Tomorrow we’ll run Act 2.

Yesterday, going into a playful, childlike scene where 4 of the characters flash back to childhood, the director had the actors play Zip, Zap, Zop (an energy-trading circle game) and another game where everyone on the outside of the circle imitates the sound and movement of the person on the inside.

After this went on for awhile, she removed the 3 actors who weren’t in the scene and had the game continue with only the 4 characters in the childhood flashback.

Then they improvised the scene.

This seems like such an obvious thing to do, to let an exercise evolve into scene work by reducing the exercise to the characters in question, but I have never, ever seen anyone do it before. It worked well.

And today the director used a very simple exercise to work lines in a scene with physical tension, initiated by one of the actors. The two actors in question arm-wrestled while they ran the lines.

This allowed them to work the lines of the scene without having to trip up over the dynamics of the fight, but while keeping contact and energy between them.