Posted by Heather on Jul 13, 2010 in Blog | 1 comment

Day One, Week 2

Slowly slowly, baby steps-

That’s what I kept telling myself as we were working on the first two of three heroin hallucinations today.

It’s a challenge to bring the experience of this drug

coursing through someone’s veins into a theatre experience…

One of the fascinating things about this play is that a couple of the drug sections shift from an external perspective to an internal one- and while the person is hallucinating, there are plot points that happen, moving the character’s emotion journey forward in the play.

Today we spent time exploring how to make the shift from the external perspective to the internal, how to show/share the sensations that Peter, (the heroin user) is experiencing and how to balance the interplay between his physical experience with his emotional progress during the hallucination.

Through the patient, slow exploration we arrived at what I would call ‘a sketch’ or an outline of the different components that will make up the first hallucination scene. Next time we’ll explore each component more fully and then put the pieces together. It really is over an hour of rehearsal for each minute of stage time… Slowly, slowly, baby steps and trusting that the layers of investigation will accumulate into a rich, dynamic interpretation of the scene.

That was one portion of the morning. To finish the day, Bryan and I spent more time on another drug section.

This hallucination begins with a monologue that has a number of plot points, it also has a different feeling than the first hallucination and Peter narrates a large part of the ‘trip’, after shooting up on stage. However, what he’s actually doing is recalling a hallucination, not experiencing for the first time; he is telling us about the experience and showing it to us at the same time.

I’m aware that there are traps to avoid; both the language and the physicality can quickly become redundant: we want the body and text to be communicating different parts of the story at the same time. Another trap to avoid is known as ‘telling, not showing’: if he stands there and narrates, that may not feel very interesting. On the other hand I don’t want us to do us some bad physical impression of a heroin overdose… So, we explore the practicalities of shooting up, the sensations of a heroin high, we try physical work in silence, we try just letting the text do the work…It becomes a ‘pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time’ kind-of game and then, after about an hour, we arrive at ‘a physical sketch’ for this section. We’ll come back to it again soon.

There’s lots more to do on these parts of the play.