First Rehearsal: White People

February 27, 2007

First Rehearsal: No matter how many times I do this, it always feels like the first day of school. We followed the usual procedures: Contract Signing, Election of Union Deputy, Design Presentations, Director’s Introduction, and Read Through. Adding to the butterflies was the fact that, as a director, I’d never worked with anybody in the room before. The actor’s have given beautiful auditions, but don’t know them as people. Are they nice? Are they easy to work with? Are they open to direction?

Despite the fact that this was the first company meeting, so much work has already been done. J. Michael Griggs (Set Designer) and I have already completed the “Design Development” phase of the production. A picture of the set is available here:

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/%7Ejmgriggs/portfoliopages/wp.html.

It has already been modified from this model, but the link gives a good idea of the environment we’ve created for the piece.

Scott Nason (Sound Designer), David Kahn (Lighting Design), and I have also had design meetings, and many of the decisions that affect the look and feel of the production have already been made. Those choices have been immensely helpful to me. With this short rehearsal process, I’ve been obligated to block the whole play in my head (and on paper) before we start. This “traffic pattern” evolved slowly over the past couple of weeks, as the result of reading and re-reading the text while staring at photographs of the model. It might change once we get into the rehearsal hall, but having a plan from which to depart saves time over discovering the blocking organically in rehearsal. It’s a first mark on the canvas.

Read-Through was a powerful experience. Hearing the piece aloud for the first time is always a revelation. It’s the actors’ first mark on the canvas, and helps me identify how to work with them to help them and their characters through the journey they take through the play.

As an actor myself, I’m always fascinated by the prospect of helping another performer around and through the “actor traps” in a play. When you are performing you have to sacrifice perspective in order to live in the immediate present of your character. As a director, I can see and diagnose things in a performance that I would never be able to spot in my own work as an actor. Going back and forth between the two disciplines, I believe, has helped me become better at both. They inform one another.

With the remaining time I held forth for about 20 minutes about how I like to work, and then we plunged into the text. We didn’t get very far before we had to stop, but in that time I could tell that the actors are lovely, generous people (they almost always are), open to input, and willing to work outside their comfort zone in the exploration of this play; a promising first day of school.

- Diego Arciniegas

"Freezing" the Show.

We've just finished our first week of previews, and as usual for this sort of thing, we’ve put the show through several big changes. The show the first review audiences saw last Friday was 21 minutes longer than the version we are performing now. After seeing the first two previews Janet and Steve and I agreed that we needed to find even more economy in telling the story, so we spent last weekend looking at what cuts we would make at the beginning of this week. When the actors came back in to rehearsal Tuesday we announced significant line and scene cuts -- just about every scene (and every page!) was affected in some way. We rehearsed the Act One changes that afternoon, and did the Act Two changes Wednesday. Remarkably, the company absorbed all the changes very quickly, and by the Wednesday evening preview, we all felt the show was considerably improved by the changes. The last few nights have gone well, with almost sold out houses for the last two previews. I'm "freezing" the show now (at least for the rest of this weekend), and won't make any final changes to the show until the rehearsal next Tuesday. That will really be our final opportunity to make changes in time before press start to come in.

- Rick

First Day on Stage

Today, Saturday, is our first day on our stage at New World Stages. New World is a really interesting underground complex of five Off-Broadway theatres near 50th St. and 8th Ave. It's certainly exciting to be working right here in the Broadway district on the show. The set is quite beautiful in the space, and I'm very eager to spend the next few days working out all the technical details. The cast was definitely ready to move uptown to the stage from our rehearsal hall in Chelsea. We did two very good full run throughs the last two days, so we all know the way through the show now.

Last year when we held our tech rehearsals for this show at New Rep we fell far behind our schedule due to some very strange computer glitches we experienced with our lighting system. Now, today, our poor Assistant Stage Manager has become so ill that she has had to be admitted to the hospital, so we're behind the eight ball already again. I'm beginning to wonder if tech problems are just inevitable for some reason with this show!

- Rick

Rehearsals for Bill W. and Dr. Bob

Well....we just finished our first two weeks of rehearsal here in New York, and it's been wonderful getting back into it with this great cast. The authors, Stephen Bergman and Janet Surrey, and I worked on a revised draft of the play after the New Rep production was over last Spring, and we've gone on now in the first two weeks to continue to make even more changes. Little word changes, line trims, and rewrites continue to make the show tighter and clearer every day. It's both fun and a little strange to be back in New York after so many years of working in Boston. Rachel and I are even living in an apartment in Brooklyn, the borough in which I was born and raised. We so miss our home, though. I'll get to be back in Boston in about four more weeks, but Rachel may be here as long as 7 months if the show is successful and continues to run.

We had our first run-thru yesterday in the rehearsal hall, and it went quite well, all things considered. These runs are sometimes called "stumble-throughs", because that's the way they usually go, but this one was a pretty tight affair. I know it has helped a great deal that the actors did the show a little less than a year ago. Even though we are working with a completely different set, and I've thoroughly changed the staging, their familiarity with these characters is making the work go very smoothly.

We had a very special research experience this past week when we were special guests at Stepping Stones, the home of Bill and Lois Wilson about 45 minutes north of the city. It's now run by a foundation, and we were given a tour by the Executive Director, as well as access to all the Bill, Lois, Bob and Anne correspondence in their archives. It was incredibly enlightening for all of us, and a nice break from the rehearsal hall for a few hours. The actors discovered all sorts of interesting little nuances about their characters from the private letters, and I'm sure this knowledge will alter some of their moments on stage in unexpected ways.

This week, we'll spend our last few days in the rehearsal hall, which is in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. Saturday will be our first day on the stage at New World Stages, where our lights and scenery are beginning to be loaded in today. This will be a very busy week, as our preparations for the first preview on the 16th really start to take on momentum.

More soon!

Rick