We finally made it to the room and it couldn’t have come at a better time.  To layer on top of our Covid cases, our Zoom fatigue, and the looming election, our University community was under threat on Friday.  The specifics are still being withheld (it’s the subject of an FBI investigation), but the long and short is racists threatened the safely of our community demanding that the Black Lives Matter mural be painted over.  I mean.  Come. On.  So, yes, getting into the room to make things has never seemed more urgent.  I told my ensemble and I’ve been repeating it ever since as a kind of mantra: as long as we keep making things, we win.

Monday.  I arrived at the theatre feeling like I needed to give them a first day address for the coming work as a way of explaining a decision I had made over the weekend.  The only way to truly spend the time necessary in order to do justice to our journey is to conflate the two experiments into one.  With the time we lost, the constraints we now face along with who knows what’s around the next corner, there really is no other option.  I know it’s the right move, but I needed to be able to articulate the reasons to them so that they don’t feel cheated in any way.  To be clear, it’s not a cancellation.  We can bring in elements from our Grotto experiment to our Main Quad experiment and still play with much of what we had planned on.  We’ll use the colored flashlights in the glass coffins to draw the eye to the colored masks on the body actors.  We’ll bring experimental blocking into the rehearsal room along with the distanced realistic blocking.  And, if we have time, we’ll play with Anne as a liminal character between the world of the play and the audience.  If anyone has to pivot to Zoom, they can Zoom into the vocal chorus, which means we could handle up to four ensemble members having to do so and still move forward.  That also means that everyone has to be able to play any body character, which in turn forces our blocking to stay simple.  This move also allows the production team to simplify their workload and move forward together instead of divided between the two locations.  By the end of my rambling, I think I had succeeded in making sense out of the decision, but I was grateful for the work that laid ahead that evening.  

Dream Piece share day is always one of my favorite days in any process and the fact that this day was postponed a week made the anticipation even greater.  Just the action of getting up in front of a group and performing for a couple of minutes felt enormously consequential.  I should mention that I adapted this tool from Shana Cooper’s Essence Pieces and I’m sure her’s were adapted from elsewhere.  I’ve read about many variations, but mine tries to keep it simple.  I give them 3 themes, 2 opposing forces, 3 props and the following directions: Create your character’s most recurring dream.  It must contain at least one of the themes and have a moment of each opposing force.  No words may be used, but sounds are okay.  Investigate the space physically, not just mentally.  Do not create literally, but instead with the logic of a dream.  Above all, have fun!  I’ve been using this devising method since graduate school and it has never disappointed.  It’s evolved over the years and will continue to, but the reasons are always the same.  It gives the actors a chance to investigate their character physically while they are doing the mental work of tabling the script, so it balances the work out.  I always find something to steal and adapt for our larger work, be it a gesture or an entire movement.  Finally, it really brings the ensemble together in a beautiful way as we get to perform something of our own devising for the group.  I always lead off with as much gusto as I can to set the tone for the room.  I had not performed a dream piece in a mask just yet and the performing wasn’t so bad, but the 10 minutes afterwards of trying to catch my breath while sweating profusely into my mask was less than desirable.  One thing that I had learned from doing them this semester in my acting class was that so much more of the dream had to be told by the body because of the mask.  This seemed like an excellent place to start for the body actors since making the action of the play legible will be one of our biggest challenges.  Without exception, the ensemble did a wonderful job and it was unique to be able to see two versions of each character’s dream (since at least one vocal actor and one body actor play the same character).  After each dream, I ask the ensemble what they saw, but never the dreamer what they dreamt.  I love the moments when the dreamer seems in awe of what their dream inspired; it never fails to happen.  As always, I hope it was a fruitful for them as it was for me.

Next up, we started actually blocking.  Sort of.  I took Miller’s stage directions and edited them down to their bare essence.  The idea is to have the ensemble create a movement piece to the initial stage directions to quite literally set the scene.  I left them alone to create, which was a natural evolution from the dream pieces.  After jamming with the production team for a while on what our evolved experiment meant for them, I returned to see what the acting ensemble had come up with.  It was exactly what I had hoped: a sketch of the scene that I could then edit and refine.  It was so nice to be creating in a rehearsal room again.  After a few iterations of that, we moved onto the character descriptions.  I asked them to work with their character partner and develop a gestural movement piece that paired with the spoken description.  This is inspired by a similar tactic that Kabuki theatre uses in setting up character.  Miller really has the best descriptions:

Keller​ is nearing sixty. A heavy man of stolid mind and build, a business man these many years, but with the imprint of the machine-shop worker and boss still upon him. When he reads, when he speaks, when he listens, it is with the terrible concentration of the uneducated man for whom there is still wonder in many commonly known things, a man whose judgements must be dredged out of experience and a peasant-like common sense. 

After a little time, they all shared and there were some nice sketches there as well.  One pairing ended up doing the gestures as they travelled, which I have a feeling I’ll be stealing for next rehearsal’s work.  All in all, it was a great night’s work and a successful restart.   We made things, so we won.

Thursday.  It’s not getting any easier.  In fact, it’s getting harder.  All the layers of anxiety I spoke to at the top are starting to weigh on everyone and it’s palpable.  It’s like snow.  A dusting is as light as a feather, but layer upon layer of snow becomes a destructive force capable of leveling the soundest of structures.  I had all sorts of strategies to encourage a recommitment to the work, but at the end of the day, I decided to just name our collective trauma and share a deep breath.  Theatre has always been the room where I could check the world at the door and take a vacation in the work.  But these are unprecedented times and that notion is being challenged.  I hope that it holds.  

As to the work, we picked up where we left off and refined the scene setting and character introductions.  I’ve created a physical box for us to work in with an acting block in each corner and one in the middle.  This will give us architecture and physical rules.  Each character has a block and that is their space to command, though they cannot move into the others’ territories unless there’s a big reason.  As we worked through, I learned a few things.  We are working with a vocal shift for Mother in this first scene and there needs to be a physical transition to help with this device; almost as if Mother is donning the performative nature and then shedding it again.  When characters have been vocally absent for a bit, their first line necessitates some physical move so that the audience doesn’t need to do any work putting voice and body together.  Finally, directing this is an absolute trip.  I was giving direction to the body actors and then realized that the direction I was giving should start with the vocal actors.  I brought them together at the end and encouraged them to listed to all of my direction and try to translate it for their role, regardless of who I’m directing it at.  So, yeah, just learning how to direct a new form that we’re creating as we go.  We’ll add that layer of anxiety right on top.