Day 22, Fri 6/21
I did finish the rewrite of TO DIE IN ATHENS last night. This draft of the script is done. Chris and I both go straight to our computers in the morning. The backlog of work at this stage of the game is enormous – notation, rewrites, last-minute casting changes. I send out so many emails this morning I start to feel like the post office. There isn’t enough time, even with Hermione’s Time-Turner, which I broke when I dropped it in the garbage disposal.

Today is the first TO DIE IN ATHENS singing rehearsal, with Gabby and Phil C. It’s such a relief to hear actors’ voices on these words, words that have heard no voices except mine since Indianapolis. That work is followed by scene study, followed by 2 solid hours of working through the script fine-tuning details: transitions, intros, recitative sections. The music is going to be so gorgeous. It all seems to be working, so far.

“So far it’s working out,
Everything’s different now
So far…”
– Buckcherry

A side note: in directing this realistic scene, I find myself using less blocking than ever before in my life. I am content to let the actors wander wherever they want. All I care about is whether their choices seem motivated. And they do, putting on their military jackets and 50s-era dresses for the first time. The costumes constrain them beautifully. They seem much more wound up.

We work until the evening. We watch an improvised Jane Austen show at Impro Theater, with my friend Michelle in the cast, along with all the HW students. It’s delicious and extremely refined longform improv. On the way home, CF says improv might be the purest form of acting – all impulse. I say I want an improv company to be part of my theater collective, along with dance and everything. He says that concert dance is the one art form he doesn’t see merging with theater. We talk about symbiotic art. The chorus is an example of it.

The chorus doesn’t make sense, isolated from its co-symbiotes (word? not a word?) of music, dance (I guess I should say “movement”), meter, rhythm, of collective speaking and acting, of multiple actors.
Poetry is untranslateable. The language, the original beauty of it, is lost to us. But that doesn’t mean you can’t try to give the chorus back what it’s missing.

Cindy emails me an article about choruses when I get home, so depressing to me I don’t even want to link to it – another person who has cast the chorus as a single individual, and doesn’t know what their dramatic function is.