Category Archives: the audience

Lydia, the audience

Lydia rehearsal, Week 2, Day 5

We continued our second pass through the play and are in good shape to have a run of Act 1 at the end of the day tomorrow, before everyone leaves for the holidays.

The director’s exercise this day had to do with walks and how you find them. She had the actors walk in a circle and asked them to walk on different parts of their feet:
– the outside
-the inside
-the ball first
– the heel first

then revert to neutral, but walk with different parts of the face leading it:
-chin
-forehead
-nose

all in the aim of finding different possibilities for character walks.

As usual with this kind of isolation work, I find the differences between the possibilities so illuminating, and so full of content.

I remember the day in the MOH&H workshops when Dave and Michele and others decided we needed to try to do improvs without narrative at all – pure abstract improvs – and we couldn’t, because the audience kept supplying content. Then we started talking about “the abstract-narrative continuum.” That’s what I think of with exercises like this. No matter how purely technical the motivation, like a voice outside saying, “Walk on the heel of your foot,” the watching eye and brain will always supply some kind of story behind it. That’s the gift of the audience.

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Golda, the audience, theater

You’ll Have It In The Morning

Tonight at Molly Magee’s, after two run-throughs in our final day of tech, (and my laptop fainting like a woman of fiction in the middle of the second one) we fell into another conversation about bad theater and the way it happens so often – through money, through paint-by-numbers directing or writing, through “prescription audiences,” through mediocrity.

We criticized theater with the attention to detail of intimate family. We know her flaws better than anyone else does. (And, I suppose, she knows ours.)

I suddenly overheard myself saying that every new audience is an new opportunity to do something better. I don’t always believe that, but I try to work as if I did.

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