Monthly Archives: December 2007

Lydia

Lydia rehearsal, day 5

Our final day of table work ends with a runthrough. Fittingly, since everyone is itching to get on their feet, the director gives the actors homework: to come up with three iconographic tableaus or statues for your character. If you were to encapsulate the essence of your character in a statue, what would that look like? One can be abstract if you want. Start with no props. Using a chair is OK.

I talk with her about the exercises she’s been using in the costume fittings, and she tells me she almost always tries them – sometimes casts take to them, sometimes not, but this group is getting a lot out of it.

We also discuss scheduling. Our next step is to stage the entire play in four days – a rough sketch, to feel its momentum.

Standard
directing, Lydia

Lydia rehearsal, day 4

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.

Standard
Lydia

Lydia rehearsal, day 2 and 3

I was right to focus in on the director’s exercises as one of the most interesting things in our process. Today, in the interest of pursuing types of slow and fast motion, she brought out some things I’d never seen before.

We began by having the actors race across the room, where the last one to cross the finish line wins, which is a standard slow-motion thing. But then she brought THIS out, which she invented herself last night:

1) Take a chair and place it somewhere in the room.
2) As your character, go to the chair, sit in it, and get up and go to another chair. Repeat till you’ve sat in three chairs.
3) Use this to explore how your character moves and sits down.
4) If you feel like it, use the three different sits as three different points in the play.
5) Use the same kind of motion as the slow run.

They did it. It was the most engaged slow-motion I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of bad slow motion. This was different. Letting them use their characters’ bodies really freed the actors. Then she had them do it:

1) At naturalistic speed, using the same movement and intentions and sits.
2) Double time.
3) Double time.
4) Double time.
5) The same speed as #4, but being careful not to sacrifice any detail.

It was extraordinary.

Without making a big deal about it, she’s turned this kind of work into a welcome break in an intense rehearsal day, and a time for really exploring the physical and emotional relationships between characters – all without words.

We’re going to use slow and fast motion as a transition device, and a way to show how the character Ceci, who has brain damage, experiences the world sometimes.

The table work flew by. No one could believe six hours had passed.

After rehearsal, we looked at a rack full of 70s-era clothes, vintage, and then the director and I watched PROJECT RUNWAY with some old friends from OSF – Rene, Sarah Jane, and Rosalee. I rode home tonight on a bus with the windows so fogged up I couldn’t see the streets outside. And I’m working in St. Mark’s. One of my co-coffeehousers is actually reading BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.

Standard
acting, Lydia, metablog

Lydia rehearsal, day 1

I think I’m going to take a different approach to rehearsal blogging than I did on GOLDA. I’m going to write all of my notes on my private, personal wiki, which only I can access, and I’m going to only pull out the most interesting parts for this.

I really want to find a way to rehearsal blog that no one at a theater can object to, and that preserves the privacy of the rehearsal room – but still lets me share some of the observations that I think can be publicly shared, and sheds light on what makes this process cool.

So here’s my second try.

If anyone from the DCTC is reading this, I hope that you find it to be acceptable, and if you don’t, let me know. But I do think it’s a good thing for theaters in general to have bloggers publicizing them, and my only goal in doing this is to bring more audience to the profession.

So, today, we had a props meeting, a design presentation & readthrough, and finished with exercises. And the exercises the director chose to use were:

1) Writing down what kind of a color, taste, element (earth, air, wind, fire) texture, weather, smell, mode of transportation, and landscape your character would be.

2) Twizzle – walking in a circle with the director calling out commands: stop, jump, turn, and twizzle ( a 360-degree turn)
This was great coordination and group work. The second time they did it, the three men in the cast (who are here – the fourth comes soon) couldn’t be taken out. I thought they would have gone on jumping and turning forever.

3) The basic trust exercise: stand in a circle and fall to each side.
I’ve never seen anyone do this for as long as they did. It was like watching a starfish forming and collapsing.

4) “Close your eyes. Think of two other members of the cast. Open them. Walk around the room till you can form an equilateral triangle with those two people. Go.”
And they came into unison on this after less than a minute.

It was all very effective for building an emotional bond between the cast members, and for letting the new words of the sixth draft just wash over them.

Standard
metablog

So I’m now getting spam blog comments,

Like this:
“Hello! My credit is awful (very bad) with credit score of 360. My family has financial problems. We need to solve them as soon as possible. My cousin advised me one site but how to know for sure whether it is reliable or not. I will be waiting for your answer. Please, help”

and a link.

Does this mean my blog has attracted the attention of enough people to be spammable? I’m going to take it as a compliment. Or maybe it’s just a spamming robot. I will be waiting for your answer. Please, help.

Standard
quotes, travel

The dream is forming into a chain.

“…Memory becomes a cataract that threatens to drown her, and Inez Prada wakes with a cry. She isn’t in a cave. She’s in a suite at the Savoy in London. She casts a sideways glance at the telephone, the hotel notepad and pencils, to reassure herself. Where am I? An opera singer often doesn’t know where she is or where she’s just come from.”
– from INEZ, (Carlos Fuentes)

Standard
books, quotes, style, writing

He was…elsewhere. “Il est ailleurs.”

“I am dying but the universe goes on. I can’t bear being separated from you. But if you are my soul and you live in me like a second body, my death will not be as inconsequential as a stranger’s.”
– from INEZ, by Carlos Fuentes

Sarah Rose and I were talking yesterday about dialogue and narration in fiction style. She read me a short story of hers which contained a dialogue scene without dialogue. The narrator told the story of the conversation without quoting any of the words.

It’s a device that I wouldn’t have thought of, being so stylistically geared towards plays and spoken words, but I’m curious to see if I can do it.

Reading INEZ this morning made me realize, too, that when the narrator’s voice is distinct, all narration is dialogue.

Off to a props meeting and first rehearsal for LYDIA.

Standard
theater, travel

Destination Theater

I met a woman from Maryland in the lobby of P&P last night, who had flown in from out of town just for a few vacation days to see shows at the DCTC. I shared this with some of the house staff and they were pleasantly surprised. But Denver has enough shows going on in rep right now that, like Ashland, it can be a real destination.

You can’t see eight plays in four days, and they don’t go to OSF’s extent of changing over shows on different stages – here, one play plays on one stage till it closes – but you can still make quite a weekend of it. Denver also has the attractions of natural outdoor activities. If they can maintain an audience from out of town as well as their local community, they’re in great shape.

“I love this town,” the woman said. “I come back all the time.”

I think that’s pretty impressive for a regional theater with the weather and transportation problems this airport must have, especially now.

Come to think of it, I remember Stephen flying to see 1001 here, from LA. But that was when he was looking at it for NOTE. This woman wasn’t a theater person – she was just a working professional on vacation. That’s even better.

Standard
a propos of nothing

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
(Wallace Stevens, 13 Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird)

Snow is falling. I’m in Leela’s, working, and outside the streets are turning white.

Last night when I came out of P&P it was a partial snow, like soft icing on the cake of the park benches, like every lamppost and car and newspaper stand was a muffin that had had its top iced. Today it was like cigarette ash, dandelion fluff, dust on the streets of the world. Tonight it’ll turn hard as varnish.

I see it with so much surprise, having never, ever lived in a snowy place before this. And there may not be any new metaphors left for it. A blanket. A sheet. Sleep. I walk through it like an alien experiencing texture for the first time, and it’s so beautiful I don’t expect it to be cold on my hands.

There is nothing at all to be done about snow except to get cold and to stare until your eyes and skin are burned.
And the women of Denver are still going to the theater in high heels and open-toed shoes.

Standard