And you may ask yourself "Am I right, or am I wrong?" And you may say to yourself My God, what have I done? -- Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime
It is the actor's day off today, we don't rehearse on Wednesday nights. That means that for now I am in Washington, D.C. at my parent's house getting away from it all for roughly 20 hours. Just because the actor's have a day off doesn't really mean I do, and in the world of e-connectivity, there is always work to be done. I limit myself on weekends to doing no outside work other tha rehearsal prep and rehearsal, but other than that a typical day finds me spending the mornings doing work, the afternoons doing a variety of things (sometimes work, usually not) and then the evenings in rehearsal until 10:30 PM. After which Clay and I usually rent a movie. So today, I'm trying to take it a little easy.
Last night was the culmination of all of our book work, and the transition from Clay helming the show to me helming the show. I've been itching for this moment since we started. This is not due to anything on Clay's part- we're pretty sympatico on this show, and we have a great working relationship- it is simply that when you are used to being in charge, being in the room and not being in charge is really really hard.
So last night was evenly split between an assignment I gave the actors and a week-capping read through of the script.
All art is theft, and the exercise is nothing original. I learned it (appropriated it, molded it to my uses) from Steve Cosson, artistic director of The Civilians and with any monologue heavy show, it works wonders. You give the actors the following rules, and tell them that anything else they want to do is fine as long as they follow the rules:
1) Pick a section of text spoken by your character no shorter than one word, no longer than one sentence. The text should be what you think is the central nugget of that character.
2) Create a composition to evoke that line.
3) The composition does not have to include spoken text, but if it does, the only spoken text can be that nugget of text you have chosen.
4) You can use anything you want in the composition (including other people) but you cannot spend more than 1 minute setting it up.
5) The composition can last no longer than two minutes
So tonight we watched the compositions, everyone had to do one composition for each character who has a monologue that they perform. That's a lot of characters, and it took awhile, but I always love this night of rehearsal. You really gain an appreciation of your actors as creative artists. You also find out what they think are the keys to their characters. And you get to steal staging ideas from them. It works to everyone's benefit. It also gets them to look at the text in a less logical, more ephemeral way, which is always good.
After that we did a readthrough of the text. We sat the chairs in a circle, and we gave them the following rules:
1) You must stand when speaking and perform the text for the rest of the cast.
2) Don't try to go off book yet
3) Keep the pace up
What this revealed to me is how far we've come (a long way), and also how far we have to go. Right now there is little stylistic cohesion in the show. Working together, Clay and I need to take these 24 great scatterbrained moments and construct a world that is more than the sum of its parts. It's a tough job, but I think we're in a good place to do it.
Movies Watched Thus Far: Mean Creak, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Event Horizon, Screamers
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