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