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There's a debate going on in some blogs and comments about how to, or even whether or not to, blog about the process while you're creating a play (at Isaac Butler's Parabasis and Mac Rogers' SlowLearner). My attitude, and part of the reason for this blog, is a qualified "Yes." I started the blog as a response to theatre blogs that I felt were all head and art-talk, to talk about the day-to-day nuts and bolts of making a show.
At the same time, I rapidly discovered I couldn't talk about everything, or even as much as I wanted to, when it came to the rehearsal process. It's just instinctual - there are some things that can be shared, and some things that can't, and not just when it comes to the work of the actors, but even for myself. I wouldn't mind throwing up some of a work-in-progress, but just some bare notes? No. And that is the state some of these shows are still at.
Again, though, it's all instinctual. I usually mention to the actors on any of my projects now (though I think I forgot it with some of the current ones) that I have this blog and unless they say otherwise everything is open game for me to write about, and I've gotten polite responses making it clear where the line is (one actress was very good in her emails back and forth, as we discussed her character for a show last year, in noting "THIS IS NOT FOR THE BLOG" when she didn't want something shared outside the two of us).
So I don't write about it as much as I'd like, because when I remove what I can't write about, what's left becomes "We had a good rehearsal last night" or "last night's rehearsal was harder than I thought, and we didn't get as much done as I wanted," and that just gets boring. I'll try to find new ways to write accounts of these things that aren't just that, promise.
Saturday we worked on Spell, which I've been writing more and more as it's been coming to me. The previous day I had written a difficult little piece, where I needed to have the Three Witches of the play, in the third scene, predict where the rest of the 32 scenes of the play would go, in abstracted rhyming couplets (which, I decided, should also never repeat a rhyme and all had to mention the scene number in some way). First then, I had to figure out what all the scenes of the play were actually going to be, which still had been up in the air, and once I had that, hacked away at the scene, which took the afternoon (the couplets falling into an anapest pattern, which is what I normally fall into if I'm not trying to do something else), and may need some revising, but worked well when spoken, and will do for now:
WITCH 3
When shall we three meet again?
WITCH 2
When twice four voices speak quickly of sin.
WITCH 1
When a fifth of her head is a fountain of pride.
WITCH 3
When she hides from the doctor six others inside.
WITCH 2
When a sister of pain calls the seven to hurt.
WITCH 1
When eight times eight years are spent fighting for dirt.
WITCH 3
When she speaks of the madness that turns one to nine.
WITCH 2
When it splits her poor soul in ten fragments so fine.
WITCH 1
When she forces eleven into a small frame.
WITCH 3
When the twelfth man who loves her must give her his name.
WITCH 2
When a sister of tears has just thirteen for luck.
WITCH 1
When his fourteen decisions reduce light to muck.
WITCH 3
When fifteen fast facts force her mouth to speak true.
WITCH 2
When the girl of sixteen at her bedtime is blue.
WITCH 1
When seventeen deaths will not pleasure the queen.
WITCH 3
When murder is done by the girls of eighteen.
WITCH 2
When she shoots nineteen bullets into a false heart.
WITCH 1
When he turns twenty violent thoughts into an art.
WITCH 3
When twenty-one hours are spent in her nest.
WITCH 2
When she turns twenty-two with his hand on her breast.
WITCH 1
When a half of the race will come in twenty-third.
WITCH 3
When the twenty-four dead still cry out to be heard.
WITCH 2
When the man with the answers speaks twenty-five lies.
WITCH 1
When a sister of shadows blinds twenty-six eyes.
WITCH 3
When the twenty-seven armies have gotten their fill.
WITCH 2
When the twenty-eighth insult provokes her to kill.
WITCH 1
When the twenty-nine facts finally enter her brain.
WITCH 3
When she tries to escape on the thirtieth train.
WITCH 2
When thirty-one fragments become again one.
WITCH 1
When she turns thirty-two and the counting is done.
Sunday night I went out in the car to pick up some dinner for Berit and I, and as I was making a right-hand turn I suddenly had a big "Eureka" moment that solved how I was going to write a scene between THE MAN and FRAGMENT 1 that had been driving me nuts - literally right in the time that I had the steering wheel turned. I never get sudden ideas like this plopping right into my head, and it so stunned me I missed my next turn and had to keep circling around, still nodding to myself, "Oh my god, yeah, that's it exactly, that's exactly how that scene needs to work!" I wish I had more moments like that, like a clear white light shooting into my brain; most of the time, it's pounding away hard at the words until the right ones become clear. I still haven't written the scene, but it's there in my head, waiting and ready. It's exciting, and I'm almost nervous about setting it down - but it solves several potential expositional problems with the play, and opens it up on one more meta-level.
In other nuts-and-bolts work, I've been dealing with all the Equity forms for all the shows, writing the Ambersons press release, revising schedules as more conflicts come in, and sending out emails for info that I need or reminders to the casts. And writing lists of what still needs to be done on Ambersons before we open on June 1, which is suddenly not very far away at all. Two weeks and five days. Yeesh.
In the rest of the world, Robert Rauschenberg is dead. The Times obit HERE calls him a "Titan" in the headline, and I couldn't think of a better word. Another obit, from the Chicago Tribune is HERE. I've always had a mixed reaction to RR - either he really hits it and I just LOVE a piece, or it's just "meh." Never really disliked anything I saw, I don't think.
I once got the freelance job of mounting the slides he'd created for a Trisha Brown dance piece at White Oak. They had been doing the dance for years with just RR's original slides, and had finally decided to make copies of them to use, and put the original slides away in storage. So they were delivered to me from the lab that made the copies, but I was surprised to have the original RR slides delivered to my little office in The Piano Store theatre on the LES, as well as the roll of copies, and I had to give my dad and stepmom a kind of hysterically giggly call about how I had a box of Rauschenberg originals sitting next to my foot in my crappy little office. I kept them very safe for the week or so that I had them.
Back to work now on forms I need to fill out for the AEA Showcase. More rehearsals tonight and every night for a while. More here when I get to it.
