It is time.  Well, almost.  It’s almost time.  I kept trying to wrap my head around any work I could get done prior to Week Seven’s rehearsal.  What are our production needs?  What scenes should we pick to experiment with?  What should the casts look like?  And every time I sat down to do the work, I realized I just didn’t have enough information.  I had heard the pitches from the groups last week and they were at various stages of completion, but all fairly worked out.  It was important to get as specific as possible in these pitches even though it was never the goal to put on the experiments with full production value.  We may not be able to render the costumes they have chosen, but they needed to choose those costumes in order to make decisions in other areas.  As we saw from the diagram on our first day of rehearsal: every tool we have in the theatre can and should affect every other tool.  So, miring ourselves in the complexity of the pitches was necessary.  And now to share my favorite quote of all time, coined by Chief Justice Warren: “I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.”  I’ve been carrying this quote around since I was an undergrad writing a paper on Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.  I think I got it from my mom; I’ll have to ask her.  These words have continued to come up in every process, every class, and every other area of my life since discovering it.  My goal is always to get lost in the complexity of a problem that I am trying to solve so that I can then get to the simplicity on the other side.  That simplicity isn’t worth anything without the journey and that what this week was all about.

Monday. I presented the quote to the group on the white board and then asked each group to come up and present their full pitch.  Once presented, we would work to define the essential questions and needs of each.  The Main Quad group was up first.

This was the most comprehensive pitch, which led to the most effortless simplicity.  Sensing this might be the case, I had them go first.  To be fair, they had the most flexible space, but I really appreciated how they worked through each piece and how it related to the others.  The essential ideas behind the experiment were separation of voice and body and distanced but natural blocking.  To achieve this, the essential tech elements were glass coffins (what we are morbidly calling the plexiglass screens), mics and speakers, color coded covid masks, and color-coded costume tie-in for the voice actors to connect them visually to the body actors.  

The Courtyard group was next and, like the chosen geography, it felt the least defined.  

I tried to curate the pitch towards something that was doable, different from the others, and still felt connected to what the group was interested in.  For instance, they seemed to really want to work with silhouette and shadow to attempt the kiss between Chris and Anne; so much so that they had flats built in their drawing.  I encouraged them to think about using the existing architecture of the space instead of erecting a set.  After all, what the space afforded us was the most dynamic architecture of the three sites, so why not use it?  Once we had massaged the pitch as a group, we arrived at the simplicity.  For the essential ideas, we arrived at working with shadow and light, developing a new language for blocking, and working with full face masks in the style of the stock characters.  To accomplish this, we will need a light source and covid masks plus painted covid shields.  A big question that remains is whether or not we’ll be able to hear the actors; we do have walls to bounce off of, but we’ll see if that’s enough.

Finally, we moved indoors to the Grotto in Highsmith.  Unlike the other spaces, there is tech built into the space and a stage.  I will say, though, despite the more traditional set up, the group still went for a non-traditional approach and combined the two previous approaches without having heard them.

For the essential experiments, this group went with a separation of voice and body, creating a new blocking language, and treating Anne as a witness to the story.  That last one was the outlier and something we’ve been talking about in reaction to the American Stock Characters.  She’s the one that doesn’t fit a mold and from that, we wonder if she could stand outside of the story when she’s not involved, watching and visually commenting to the audience.  What we need to accomplish this will be the coffins, lights (hand-held and hung) to tie the voice and body actors together, clear masks to lip sync, and acting blocks to help with the new blocking language.  

There we have it.  Three simple pitches and plenty of time to accomplish them.  We go into the production meeting with a much clearer idea of our asks and then I go to the drawing board to figure out which scenes will best accomplish these goals.  It feels good to be on the side of simplicity.  No matter the process, it’s always a relief.  The complexity often brings panic and the other side brings calm.  At least, in a normal world…

Thursday.  Following our theme of simplicity, I wanted to streamline the chosen scenes as best as I could.  Knowing that I wouldn’t hit all the requirements that we had set from the previous meeting, I looked to our core characters and their arcs.  I ended up with three scenelets (four pages a piece) that centered around Keller, Mother, Chris, and Anne.  Twelve pages three different times is doable, right?  Right.  I had that previous exchange with myself at least twenty times, but still feel pretty good about it.  I then wanted to cast it in a way that each actor was only dealing with one character.  As it turned out, I had eight ensemble members that wanted to focus on acting; it all started to fall into place.  In the main quad, I cast four voices and four bodies.  In the Grotto, I just flipped the voices and bodies.  Then, in the Courtyard, I double cast each role remembering that one thing that was brought up as a potential experiment was have the actors switch masks in order to have more than one actor play a role.  This fell into place beautifully like when you put in those last pieces in the thousand piece puzzle you’ve been working on for weeks.  

The work of the day was assigning the production staff to traverse the spaces with their light and sound mentor, Rob Bowen, a long-time faculty member of the department.  While they did their work, I worked with the actors.  I had planned to work through each scene three different ways, but as with almost every plan these days, I realized I had to pivot rather quickly.  After reading the first scene and tabling it again with all the new information we had, I decided to go ahead and try to divide Mother’s voice between a few different actors.  It was wonderful, but I wanted to give space to the room and see their reaction.  Turns out, it wasn’t just me.  We spent the rest of the time working in this way, trying different choices that would frankly bore you, dear reader, but trust me when I say it was thrilling.  It finally felt like all of this work was getting somewhere; we were breaking through into something new and it felt right.  We were off and the work ahead was full of possibilities.  As long as we can keep working together in this way, with this energy, and above all else safely, we’re gonna be just fine.  Till next week.