Day one:
Meet and Greet
Sign letters of agreement
Read the script. It was an intense reading- the concentration in the room was considerable… Here’s a photo of peeps around the table delving into this rich play.
Then a brief talk about the play- Any strong feelings, thoughts… What did you learn about it this time?
And then we start scene work with Bryan, Emily, Paul and Marilla
It’s clear that two of the practical challenges for the production are our old friends time and money. We’re doing this play at SummerWorks on an Equity co-op basis, (known affectionately in England as a ‘profit-loss’) so peeps are working to pay for lives while also rehearsing- it’s always a fine balance. I’m in rehearsal and also organising things outside of rehearsal, (so no time for earning money at the moment); I’m immensely grateful for my next directing gig, Anything Goes, which is subsidizing my life during this rehearsal process.
We’ll be spending some time cutting the script this week. Although it’s 55 pages and we’ve got 75 mins. and that should, in theory, be enough time for the play to be played, we learned in the read-through that it’s about 90 mins… gulp! So, out come the proverbial red pens. I’m sure as we get to grips with the text and accents (which are pretty super all ready-) that it’ll get quicker- and I’ll just make sure by doing cuts earlier in the process, rather than later.
We dive into the first couple of scenes of the play in the afternoon- simple text work, looking for ‘changes of units’ and giving the scenes a rough ‘physical shape’. This is all pretty standard ‘Stanislavsky approach’ at the moment, however, it’s a great way to begin to understand how the language of the play feels for the actors and get a basic structure that we can then play with next week.
Soon- the day has zoomed by!
Bryan, (who’s playing Smackheaded Peter) and I finish the day with some work on monologues- we have a good time playing with language, it’s clear that he’s starting to have a good time with the sections that we’re doing and then! it’s time to head home.
An excellent first day: intense reading to text work to playing with great freedom!
Tomorrow- choral work…