Relief.  It’s been hard to come by these days.  But by way of reason, with all the layers of anxiety I wrote about last week, there must be relief.  If there’s dark, there’s light.  If there’s heaven, there’s hell.  If there’s anxiety, there must be relief.  It comes with a pause and a deep breath, if only for a moment.  It comes with a hug from my children that I hold onto a little longer than before.  And it comes when something I’ve been working on for a long time starts to actually manifest.  While in rehearsal with the Pandemic Theatre Project, I’ve also been adapting An Appalachian Christmas Carol (my immersive, site based, puppet show) to be filmed on my property.  PTP on Monday and Thursday and ACC on Wednesday.  Both of these ventures had weeks of planning, envisioning, and hoping that the planning and envisioning would turn into something.  This is the week when I finally felt like the footage I’ve been getting for the ACC is going to translate to an online event.  This is also the week where we will see the possibilities of the PTP.  Would sweet relief bless me twice over?  

Monday.  In thinking about the blocking, I am trying to conflate two ideas into one; the distanced blocking from the Main Quad experiment and the expressive or poetic blocking from the Grotto experiment.  That need compelled me to define our space with the five acting blocks I wrote about last week.  Having mulled over our first sketch of the first scene, I’ve concluded that the characters can share the middle block, but otherwise must stay anchored in their corner.  This assures the proper distancing and creates a visual for the audience to clock, appreciate, and then let go (hopefully).  It also greatly reduces the staging possibilities which I hope will create a strong simplicity.  Another benefit of this is the ease of another actor slipping into the body role if a quarantine directive were to come down.  Makes sense, but we’ll see if it works.

I began the evening by naming the things I had learned from the last rehearsal: the performative vocality had to match the performative gesturing, the vocal shift gesture had to lead the vocal shift, vocally absent characters had to physically shift just before their first line, and above all, keep it simple.  Following that last note, we went back to the first scene and simplified some movement sections; in particular the cat and mouse sequence between Keller and Mother at the end of the scene.  I’m glad we did a full chase in rehearsal, so that feeling is in the actors’ bones, but keeping the two on their sides until they share the middle is easier to read.  Legibility above all is another golden rule of this form.  Too much movement too quickly will both obscure the storytelling and undermine the mental curation of the audience.  I initially balked a little at my body actors’ impulse to move their heads naturally as if they are speaking the lines.  It seemed too busy and unnecessary.  But I’ve come to think it might be necessary and essential.  While we’ve been working towards this form for ten weeks now, the audience won’t have any kind of context, so it’s important that we provide some kind of anchor.  I think this small behavioral speaking movement might do the trick.  There is a balance of the behavioral and the expressive that we must achieve, and this might just be the most challenging aspect of this staging.  My actors come from a school of behavioral, so that part comes naturally to them.  The hope is that if I put them in this PTP box of limitation, what comes out is that balance and all I have to do is make the story legible.  

After we revisited and revised our prologue and first scene, it was time for the real work of the night.  The second scene gives us an opportunity to continue working with the vocal shift tool, but this time with Keller.  Kerrigan, who is voicing the non-performative Keller suggested sharing a line with the performative Keller actor (Alex) in a moment when both felt present.  I loved the idea so much, I have them another two lines to do this with.  I’m looking forward to watching/hearing it another couple of times, but it might end up working really well as a device for the shift; a kind of baton pass.  The other big challenge of the second scene (and frankly the reason it was chosen) is the kiss between Chris and Anne.  We’ve been talking about this moment from Week One and have had a plethora of possibilities thrown at the wall.  The one that I kept coming back to in my mind was Chandler’s anecdote that her and her friends have been touching feet as a way of greeting or parting.  I’ve created this middle block in our space as a place the characters can share space in some way.  We put those two ideas together and, I have to say, the result is quite effective.  I hesitate to try and describe it here, but I will say it achieves the awkwardness and intimacy of a first kiss in a way that is surprising and endearing.  The scene has a ways to go, but its bones are strong.  I’ll take the wins along with a little bit of relief.

Thursday.  As with most days, my day involves juggling many different worlds: my family, my job with our rentals (Snookville), my theatre company, my classes, and the PTP.  Before my world became so full, I would be able to carve time out of the day and focus on the task at hand.  Nowadays, I find the pockets, multitask, and when I can’t do either of those, I trust in letting things marinate.  I knew I had to come into the room with something for our final scene but didn’t have the time to sit down with it.  I decided to just read it at the top of the day and allow it to work on me as I took my son to daycare, flipped properties, taught class, blew leaves, and mowed the lawn.  I knew this final scene was distinct from our first two because the characters were stripped of their performances; this was as raw and unfiltered as it gets.  Because of this, it calls for a major shift from what we have done leading up to now.  Then, as I was weeding, it hit me: we’ll shift the ensembles.  Our vocal actors will now be our body actors and vice versa.  It feels right, but the proof will be in the room.  I think the idea came as a surprise to our ensemble and I felt hesitancy, particularly from the vocal chorus that was shifting to body.  This makes sense; what they’re doing in the glass coffins is no different vocally than their regular performing, but the physical adaptation is substantial.  Even though they’ve been watching the body chorus work and learn the ropes, they all froze when the scene began.  I won’t lie, their moment of panic fed into one of my own.  We had so much momentum the way we had been working.  Why did I think it was a brilliant idea to change it all up?  But that was the point of these choruses; to have the utmost flexibility in performing.  Sure, if you had weeks to rehearse, but we don’t.  But we’re only rehearsing four pages like this, it’ll be fine.    Luckily, by the time I had make it through that inside my head, they had warmed up, and we were off.  

We have a prop in this scene, a letter, which is passed around in the script.  With the latest reports by the smart people, it sounds like surface contraction is less and less of a worry.  I read one that said worrying about that was like standing in the middle of a freeway worrying that you’ll be hit by an asteroid.  That said, it is our aim to err on the side performative safety because every potential audience member is on their own journey with how they handle the pandemic safely.  All that is to say we can’t pass around the letter.  So, I devised that it would be placed on that center shared block and be readable to anyone.  I think it’s going to work, but there was a moment with an actor, who just couldn’t understand the device; it was too much of a leap.  It’s the part of the first sketch that I’m most interested in revising or refining next week.

It’s starting to really feel like a “normal” rehearsal.  I don’t bring in the same anxiety that I’m used to carrying in this process and I’m excited to see what the ensemble comes up with.  I’m excited to respond to it in a way that I’m used to and that, more than anything, is giving me relief.  We’ll find out from the audience if any of this new form translates.  For now, though, what this new form has given us is our rehearsal room back.  And that is the sweetest relief of all.