Second Day: White People

Well here’s a first! We staged the entire play in one session. By the end of the day our brains were jello. Our conversational Freudian slips became increasingly frequent across the day, and hysterically funny; shocking the speaker more than anyone else. Not surprisingly, some of those slips revolved around the subject of race. I don’t want to give away any of the play’s secrets, but it is inevitable that a work of this nature would have us all looking inward, searching for evidence of racism in ourselves. The only thing that surprised me was how quickly it happened. I guess when you throw a play up on the stage in such a brutal rapid fashion it is inevitable that the impact will be magnified proportionally. Stage Manager Jen Cleary and I had discussed how a one-and-a-half week rehearsal process had its advantages, the greatest virtue being that you don’t have time to get in your own way. On the other hand, I doubt either of us anticipated what a roller coaster ride this might be.

Fortunately everybody seems to have enough confidence in this process
to permit the play to push us into uncharted territory. We owe it to
the material to go there.

As I mentioned in my last post, I blocked the play in advance to save time. The trouble is you never know if what you imagined is going to work in reality. (I once had a director envision blocking for me that, without exaggeration, defied Newton’s Law of Gravity.) I was pleasantly surprised to discover what had been mocked up on my little Macbook (base model – I couldn’t afford the Pro) sat rather elegantly in that downstage space, and went a reasonable way to addressing the spatial challenges posed by that quirky little theatre. My Assistant Director, Foster Johns, confessed to having experienced a small “Director-gasm” (his term). For your amusement there’s a page from this schematic pasted below. Set Designer Micheal Griggs teased me about the “beachballs” I had superimposed on his set.
Over the course of my directorial career I’ve invented a series of terms to describe staging. To modify a term a from physical therapy we worked on “Gross Motor Blocking” yesterday. This represents the basic traffic pattern and movement of bodies in space over the course of the play, This is the only aspect of the staging about which I feel comfortable making decisions without input from the actors. It is in this phase that I compose stage pictures, create and release physical and visual tension, and, more prosaically, make sure that everyone in the audience can see every moment in the play clearly. Somewhere in the midst of all that I also try to tell what I think is the playwright’s story. I identify “ranting room” for the actors for each
discrete section of the play. Ranting room is basically the perimeter of the designated playing area I’ve chosen for a particular scene. The next phase is what I call “micro-blocking”. We will go through the play chronologically and, working closely with the text and the actors, we will decide each twist and turn the characters make within that perimeter. “Do I pick up the briefcase here?”, “I think he would sit down after saying that”, etc. etc.

It’s a short rehearsal tonight (only 4 hours). We will probably only walk through the “gross motor blocking” for “muscle memory” (a term I borrowed from Choreography many years ago when I was a dancer). This should nail down the sequence of movements prior to turning our focus to micro-blocking, and the details of performance. This is the really exciting part, the most artistically rewarding aspect of the process, the moment-to-moment actions and choices. I want to carve as much time as I can for this in the next few days, prior to the technical rehearsals which swiftly approach five days from now (March 7th).

- Diego