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.

Day 18, Mon 6/18
Down the curving 395, all the way home. Check into the house-sitting. Rental car return. I am exhausted, and the fact that I will be staying in this one location through July 22 feels like forever.

Day 19, Tues 6/19
First day of the Choral Voice workshop at HW – we have the kids work on a unison chorus and then go into their individual presentations of the choruses they’ve brought in. It was a good idea to have them each pick a short chorus to present – invests them in the work. My teaching objective for this course is to empower the individual actor’s voice and impulse within the chorus, and to move “beyond unison into harmony, complexity, and variety.” It’s the same sort of thing I was doing with improvised choral movement, except with text.

We perfect our unison chorus first, in order to know what the point is we’re departing from – Chris’s idea, and a good one. I make them read it over and over again, for listening, for volume, for acting values. We must do it over twenty times.
This is the unison chorus, from 13 CHORUS / Colonus:
Child, child, child of Oedipus,
Miserable child of unhappy Oedipus….

In each case, CF plays drums and/or piano with the choruses after they’ve done them a couple times, improvising and supporting them. There is a wonderful “aha” moment when the first kid hears his film-music-style improv behind her text, and she realizes how much more powerful she is with music behind her…it’s great.

“The chorus is never alone,” I say, quite often.
“People come in groups. The chorus is never alone.”
“The music is part of the chorus.”

The individual choruses the kids brought range from Greek stuff to Shakespeare to pop music. We also hear quite a number of selections from SPRING AWAKENING and SWEENEY TODD. I love some of the short Greek ones: one girl brings in just “But who would do that? Who would choose to be dead?”

We hear each kid present his or her chorus individually, and then I start shading them in – adding
more actors, either as spectators or second voices. We don’t quite finish the presentations of individual choruses.

That same day, I also begin scene study work, on a scene with a character who’s lost his arm in a war. CF works in a practice room in and around our sessions – we are spending hours and hours every day on choruses now. Our work on the schedule was worth it.
Dinner with my parents, Katsuya. We stop by Semele in the evening – it will host the reading of 13 CHORUS this weekend – and check out the space. Unfortunately, the piano can’t be opened, so we won’t have prepared piano as we’d hoped, but in all other ways it’s excellent.

Day 20, Weds 6/20
I wake up and have some intense dental work done at the crack of dawn, then return for the second day of the Choral Voice WS at HW. We return back to the unison chorus – the kids are outraged – “You said we were moving beyond unison!” but only to make it more complicated: we introduce cacophony, chaos, harmony voices. One group seems to grasp this intuitively, the other insists on dividing choral speakers into “core” and “coloring” members. I find this a bit simplistic at first but the notation of it is a useful phrase.

After our check-in with unison, we finish the individual chorus presentations. I encourage them to classify choruses – narrative, performative, moralistic – “the way things are, the way things are supposed to be” – speaking to the audience – speaking in public – but don’t labor the point. Next we move into small-group presentations of separate choruses – “breakaway groups,” as it were. I let them break up to prepare the choruses on their own. Then I assemble all the groups on stage and tell them we’re going to do all the choruses at once – but we run out of time. It’s a very dramatic finish to the first group, but I feel like I mistimed it a bit. My pacing is even more off in the second group, and we don’t even finish their individual chorus presentations. We do take lots of time to really finesse each chorus, which never hurts.

I have to remember that there is no timeline here. They learn as much as they’re ready to learn. I can work quickly if they can – if they want to dig deep into a particular concept, there’s no reason not to. I like to follow their energy when I can.

It’s not easy, but I do enjoy being able to work with high-school-age actors on extremely difficult and experimental concepts. I feel like they can tell how hard this stuff is, and if they’re good – and these are – they like it.

More scene study, and Chris and I work some more on the play, in a practice room the size of a teacup. We are hunched over the piano like it’s food. He’s working very fast. Dinner with Chris’s brother Dan: we grill corn, salmon, and rutabagas. I manage to break a bracelet and spill the grill’s ash tray all over the front porch steps. CF and DF play on keyboards and drums, Journey, Rush, sugarcane rock, and I can’t enjoy it. My mind is elsewhere, that’s for sure. I am exhausted – I have one scene to rewrite and it’s not happening. Casting woes, too. I sleep badly, as I always do when I know I’m supposed to be writing.

Day 21, Thurs 6/21
I meet at the HW Coffee Bean, scene of high-school skullduggery and iced blended things, with a former classmate of mine who’s thinking of directing a Greek play next year. It’s wonderful to dive back into the seas of LYSISTRATA – and it’s very satisfying for both of us to be working together again. We talk about text selection, adaptation, translation. She thinks there may be an opportunity for me to come out and play with choruses with her kids. That’d be awesome.

Third day of the Choral Voice WS at HW. My classmate joins me to hear the kids’ work: I have them do some unison for her, to prove they still remember it, then some cacophony/chaos/harmony on the unison. I then drill them slowly on having one speaker present an individual chorus with a 2nd and 3rd voice being added – very rudimentary, very step-by-step, but I want her to see it. I think the review helps them, too.

Next I throw some harder text at them, a 3-part canon Chris wrote out of the “A promise to you is no promise at all” section. They get it all. I’m quite proud of them. They concentrate. My classmate leaves. Bringing in an audience member of sorts really helped them step it up. I am grateful for her presence, and decide to remember this next time.

I decide to give them an exercise I know they can succeed at – I break this group up into even smaller groups, 2-person sections, and let them work on their chorus presentations that way. Some nice surprises out of this. They try to derail the work with silliness but I keep agreeing to all their ideas, and the silliness – which is really just energy – leads to more choruses. I’m happy with it.

The next group comes in. I had planned to build them up from unison, like the first one, but they are very eager to do 4 choruses on stage at once, as I promised at the end of the last session. I don’t think they can handle it, but I let them try – and sure enough, they are ready, and we break out into a Marriage-Of-Heaven-And-Hell-style free radical chorus jam session. Anything goes. All the texts, all the time. It’s quite lovely. The kind of class that makes you love teaching.

A spontaneous moment: “What is a chorus? Is anything a chorus?” and I bounce it back to the group: and they are ready with answers. “A chorus has to have an audience.” “A chorus talks about the way things are supposed to be.” “A chorus knows the story already.” In my head, I think, “A chorus is never alone. People come in groups.” But they know that – it’s so obvious, it doesn’t need to be said.

I have a scene study session on the short scene, and I have the kids do an exercise where they get to say all their subtext out loud. I think I stole it from Amina’s Meisner class. It’s quite emotional, but worth it.

CF and I work for a couple more hours after the workshop. He’s been highballing, and has finished all the music for the show, on time. (And I still have a scene to rewrite…) The jazz combo practice rooms have great energy – there’s a sign on the wall that says “Make sure to leave the room looking as if it’s been ransacked by Visigoths.”

Dinner at Mexicali, tequila, and a 23-minute-long Dream Theater song on the drive home. I water a lawn in Pasadena and feel like all the stability I gave up to pursue this career could be mine at the drop of a hat – just by inhabiting someone else’s house. Walk the dogs, and sit with laptops in the living room. Clearly, I’m not rewriting, but blogging, all appearances to the contrary. All right, Theseus. Je vous attend.

(It is such a relief to write a post that doesn’t have to be categorized as “travel” as well as everything else. There is no travel going on right now. Thank goodness.)