Not much time to post today. A very quick turn-around between last night’s rehearsal, which ended at 10pm, and this morning’s which begins at 10am. This is the minimum turn-around time permitted by the union, and I understand why. We all have about enough time to get home, eat something, get a reasonable night’s sleep and start all over again. To make it easier for the actors I have staggered the call (the time they need to arrive), beginning where we left off last night with one character’s monologue, and letting the other two arrive a little bit later. They pleasantly surprised me last night. I had allotted the whole 4 hour rehearsal to stagger through the play and nail in the gross motor blocking. Chip Schoonmaker (Costume Designer), sat in on the stagger-through.
The presence of a new person in the room, always has an effect on actors. Immediately it became a performance, a chance to make a first impression. I always enjoy watching someone watch. I learned a lot by watching Chip watch the work. He was very excited when we took a break. This actually economized on time. It was Chip’s first time in the same room with the actors (he’s bouncing back and forth between Boston and New York because of other professional commitments – ah life in the theatre). He’d been holding off making some costume decisions until he could see them in person. The “Designer Run-Through” is slated for Friday at 2. Now, Chip has already seen what he needs, and can spend Friday afternoon shopping and pulling together clothing that will work for both the characters and the actors.
We’ve been talking about “color-keying” the characters and their world.
These characters exist in close proximity on stage, but are not actually in each other’s world. By “color-keying” the stuff in each character’s world, particularly clothing - dominant theme in the play, I can place actors very close to one another and keep clear who’s who and what belongs to whom. It allows for more flexibility in stage composition.
Anyway, we got through the show in half the time and began micro-blocking. I had time to discuss some philosophical points about performance which I’ll probably get into in a later posting: Character Judgment, Third-Party Perspectives, Serving the argument rather than playing what you think the audience ought to think, playing results rather than actions. Unless you are a theatre practitioner this is probably unintelligible. It might be unintelligible anyway. In any case we got to talk in a few abstractions. While we did this Jen Cleary, ably assisted by MeLena Hessel, our Assistant Stage Manager, placed some additional taped markings on the stage, and moved their work station from one side of the room to the other.
If you recall I mentioned that the set model had already been modified from the picture link I embedded in my first posting. Well, the modification was to change the stripes on the floor from “straight-on” to the audience to “diagonal”. (You can see the modification in my jpeg of my blocking schematic in the second posting) We did this for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it creates the illusion of depth for a very shallow and wide stage. Traditionally the stage manager tapes the blueprint of the set on the floor of the stage with special color-coded tape. Normally a detail like striped lines in the floor detail wouldn’t be included. I noticed in the stagger-through that the actors were having trouble executing the blocking I had given them, because the movement was predicated upon the diagonal lines of the floor treatment, not the perpendicular lines of the very rectangular playing space.
The other thing I noticed was that the table Stage Management uses was on the right side of the audience where the front rows would be. The presence of this “tech table” was psychologically inhibiting the actors from using the area of the stage directly in front of that part of the audience – even if they had been successful in imagining the diagonal lines that weren’t there. (Quite a lot of burden to place on actors who are tying to remember their lines and execute blocking they just received one day ago.
In any case Stage Management made those alterations while we were talking in abstractions, and we spent the rest of the evening micro-blocking the beginning of the play. Nice and new elements began to emerge and, ironically, we had to stop not far from the place we had to stop after the first rehearsal. What this meant was that poor Stephen Russell, who got cut off right before his first entrance two days ago, barely got into his scene when we had to stop again. That’s where we’ll begin at the next rehearsal.
- Diego
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