If It's Friday, This Must Be Little Piece

Waitaminit, it's Friday!

Boy did THAT week pass quick. But, luckily, productively.

We are now into less than a month before the shows all open, and, fortunately, they're all in pretty good shape. All need work, and in different ways, but it's happening. From now on until opening, Berit and I have at least one rehearsal a day for a show -- on Sundays (and Saturdays after tomorrow) we have two rehearsals for different shows.

It's tiring, but actually worth it -- at least I feel more like it is this year than I have the last two, where I've spent a good deal of the month asking myself if the ultimate reward of the shows was worth the work and exhaustion of this month before they go up. Yes, it always is, but at least this year I can feel that way in the hours outside of the rehearsal room (I'm always happy when I'm in rehearsal, but more and more often I've been spending the hours before rehearsal dreading the work to come and just wanting to quit this whole process; this has, for some reason, not been the case this year).

Me last night, directing:

So every day Berit asks me "which one is it today?" And I check to be sure myself and we grab the correct script or scripts from the pile and go off to either The Brick or Brooklyn Arts Exchange for rehearsal (in the past, we've also been at Champions Studios or The Battle Ranch, but except for one more time at the latter, we're down to just the two locations now).

Here's what I was directing last night in the photo above -- half of the cast of Blood on the Cat's Neck, at BAX (two others were there, but not in this shot):

That's Rasheed Hinds, Gyda Arber, Shelley Ray, Roger Nasser, and V. Orion Delwaterman, in the middle of the opening "monologue" section" of the Fassbinder play.

Here's a shot from two nights ago at The Brick, rehearsing the "racetrack" scene of George Bataille's Bathrobe -- our first night together with the full cast (which we're fortunate to have for the rest of the rehearsal process, amazingly), and here's 6/8ths of them -- Bob Laine, Sarah Engelke, Liza Wade Green, Bill Weeden, Justin R.G. Holcomb, and Timothy Reynolds (with Berit's hands and stage manager script lower right):

More recent rehearsal shots can be found HERE.

We've now had a chance to stumble through each of the shows a few times, and what needs to be worked in each one is more and more apparent. Bathrobe just needs to be gone over start to finish as much as possible with the full cast, now that we have them, so that everyone can remember the dream logic of the play that links the bits together -- people keep forgetting what's happening and why, as we haven't been able to connect the bits of this fairly abstract play together too well as yet. I think repetition will help (French for "rehearsal," I'm told: répéticion). The pattern needs to be felt in everyone's bones.

Blood is in the strongest shape of the three now, and is at the stage where it's all about lots and lots of niggling little notes to the actors about pace and word emphasis. And this will keep up all the way through tech and after into performances, I get the feeling.

A Little Piece of the Sun needs aspects of both the above to be worked on, but not to the extent of the other two shows -- the pattern needs to be felt more in everyone's bones, and I need to fix the tone of many little bits. Just not as much of each as in the above shows.

Actually, pace will be the continuing problem, I think, as it ALWAYS is for me (I get physically ill when the pace is off in my shows; it upsets me more when it's "wrong" than almost anything else). I know it's been drilled into actors more and more that "faster is always better," but it's not true, and especially in my shows. Cue pickup is usually meant to be quick (and if it isn't, I'll tell you), but too often I'm asking the actors to PLEASE slow the damned lines down for chrissakes! When you do shows that are fairly meditative, many beats need to have time to land and be thought about for a moment before the next one rushes in, but more and more I'm really having to demand that actors slow the hell down. I don't want milking of lines and moments, but I want the impression sometimes that what is being said is being thought about before, during and after it hits the air.

We have another 6 or 7 rehearsals for each show, followed by two tech days each and a private invited preview before proper opening, and I think all will be set fine by then.

And the 4th show, Sacrificial Offerings is going at its own, slower, pace as it's a short, easier show (we start our tiny rehearsal process in a couple of weeks). I just cast the fifth actor of eight in the cast -- Ben Robertson, like me a graduate of the Northfield Mt. Hermon School, Class of 1986! I think we last acted together at the age of 15 in Lanford Wilson's The Rimers of Eldritch at NMH. With him in that show and Aaron Baker (NMH '86) in Little Piece, I'm now directing 2 people I've known over 25 years in two different shows. Weird.

David Finkelstein last night gave me the draft of his video version of the same text - now called Marvelous Discourse - to be used in the middle of my play version. It's unfinished, but quite wonderful, and will work well for what I need it to do in my stage piece.

Tonight, Little Piece at BAX. More little things to fix. Whee.

And so, this week's Random Ten from an iPod now full of 25,570 tracks (with links to the songs or something similar):

1. "Monks" - King Missile - Failure
2. "All Messed Up" - Jess Hooper - Tennessee Rock 'n Billy 1955
3. "Heroes And Villains" - Brian Wilson - Smile
4. "Surfari" - The Boardwalkers - NPR's International Beach Ball
5. "Dreamer" - Joyce Harris - Domino Records Story
6. "Everybody's Got A Little Devil In Them" -Tommie Young - Soulin' Vol 1
7. "Didn't I Do It Right?" - Gary Glitter - 22 Of The Best
8. "Don'cha Know" - Bill Cosby - TV Characters Sing Just For You, Vol. 1
9. "Wurlitzer Jukebox" - Young Marble Giants - Colossal Youth
10. "Roadrunner" - The Heinz Kiessling Orchestra - Like A Breeze

And, yes, some newer kitty pictures of the little monsters.

Here's a drowsy Hooker kitty napping on the sleeping Berit:

And here's BOTH kitties napping on the sleeping Berit (these are the easiest times to get pictures of the brats, when they're curled up and sleepy, which usually means they're sleeping on top of one of us humans):

Now, time to get laundry and nap before rehearsal. More shots from the rehearsals soon . . .