Today is Q-2-Q day for the play. It's a long, twelve-hour day for the cast and production crew as they work to resolve and lock down all of the different sound, lighting, and video/projection cues in relation to the text and movement. Things are a bit more complicated than usual on this front for a number of reasons. First, there is the sheer number of cues (well over 80 for the video and projections alone). Then there is the fact that movement in Long Division is operating both on the level of traditional theatre blocking and in relation to an additional choreographic score. Richard and Lesley have been working hard, especially in the last week, to make the integration between the two as seamless as possible, but inevitably challenges arise with so much activity happening on stage--not to mention the sheer number of bodies engaging in that activity for the entirety of the play's 90+ minutes. Finally, there is the competition between the lighting and the video projections; despite the super-powered projectors video designer Jamie Nesbitt has borrowed for the production, as well as the decision to forgo any lino whatsoever in favour of the bare black stage floor, the word yesterday from the crew was that Jergus Oprsal's lighting was still washing out some of the images. (The fact that the Gateway's Studio B only has 24 dimmers for Jergus to work with isn't helping on this front.)
No doubt all of that will be resolved today (and possibly on Monday). For my part, it was just so exciting to see Lauchlin Johnston's amazing set installed yesterday, as well as a few of the designs Jamie has come up with projected onto it. Otherwise it was an intense day of grinding through with the actors and Richard and Lesley the finer details of both acts yesterday, especially with respect to the transitions between scenes. Part of me (the part eyeing next Thursday's preview performance) found the progress painfully incremental at times. But as Jennifer Lines said to me on the drive back into Vancouver, the minuteness and repetition of such drilling actually makes things go much faster in the long run. There is a moment, she said, when everything will click and fall into place for the actors and then the tech runs will seem like they are flying by. I certainly got a glimpse of this yesterday when we did full run-throughs of both acts; sure there were lines dropped and movement cues that were missed or late, but there was a definite sense that the actors were getting increasingly comfortable with the material and that things were coming together.
I can't wait to see a full run-through with tech to see all of the elements working off of each other. That will have to wait until Tuesday afternoon for me due to other commitments, including an interview with Radio-Canada about the play. I don't know who I'm going to talk about mathematics in French, but hopefully I'll muddle through.
P
Showing posts with label Lauchlin Johnston. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lauchlin Johnston. Show all posts
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Saturday, October 29, 2016
Long Division: First Week of Rehearsal
Today is the end of the first week of rehearsals for Long Division. In fact, as I write this our amazing cast is still hard at it in Richmond, taking turns working on their respective monologues with director Richard Wolfe and Assistant Director Keltie Forsyth, while presumably also running lines from the choral group scenes under the watchful eye of stage manager Jethelo Cabilete. Having worked our way through the beats of those scenes and any lingering questions about them by the end of the day yesterday, I decided to knock off from today's rehearsals as I have so much else to catch up on.
Not that I regret for a moment being there the rest of this past week. It's such an exciting--and terrifying--thing to dive into the rehearsal process. The exploration and moments of discovery are so stimulating; at the same time, one is always in a bit of a panic about the steadily diminishing amount of time one has for said exploration and discovery. In our case, because there are so many different moving parts to the production--not the least of which is creating and learning actual physical movement--juggling available time is one of Richard's main priorities. Fortunately, choreographer Lesley Telford hit the ground running during the first three days of rehearsal, aided by the emerging dance artists from her Arts Umbrella class with whom she has been building much of the choreography for the show, and many of whom have very generously agreed to accompany Lelsey to our rehearsals to help teach the material to the actors. And in this respect, one of the delights so far has been to watch the dancers' and actors' mutual admiration for each other's specific performance gifts. The entire cast has done an amazing, and exceedingly fast, job of absorbing into their bodies some fairly difficult physical phrases. At the same time, they've also absorbed much of the text into their brains, with several of them already off book in terms of their very long monologues. Composer Owen Belton was also present to observe what Lesley was working on in relation to his music, and to get a sense of what he still needed to come up with to accompany the rest of her movement score.
Yesterday we also got a glimpse of Lauchlin Johnston's mock-up of the set, which blew me away with its elegance and beauty. The Gateway's Studio B is not a huge space and we're losing some of that to the backdrop that Lauchlin has created, and that will additionally serve as the surface onto which video designer Jamie Nesbitt's will project his images. One thing Jamie flagged for Lauchlin and Richard was the colour of the floor. If, as originally intended, it remained white, like the backdrop, then it would create a lot of bounce from the lights that would make it hard to see the projections. This would only be exacerbated if, as planned, lighting designer Jergus Oprsal used a series of shins to provide side light from the wings. So the lino floor will now be a light shade of grey. If everything goes accroding to plan the set will be installed by next Thursday, with the lighting grid hung soon after and the cue-to-cue happening much earlier than usual so that the performers will ideally have three full tech runs instead of cramming everything into one half day.
It was also useful to have Jamie at the table yesterday for our final beat-by-beat read-through of the text, as he asked a lot of tough dramaturgical questions about what exactly was going on in different sections, and how video might support them in some instances, or conceivably work against them in others. Combined with the cast's similarly probing questions from the rest of the week, the rigorous text analysis has really forced me to justify my choices, and to explain their relevance to the overall structure of the play and the respective inner worlds of each of the characters. It also required me to not be precious about material that clearly had to go, or about changes to specific lines, however micro or macro. I really appreciate the attentiveness of all involved to my writing, as it has indeed made the work stronger and, in one instance spotted by Keltie, saved me from making a pretty glaring mistake in the math!
Lots more work to do, of course, but so far the process has been thoroughly rewarding. The level of collegiality and collaboration on everyone's part has been inspiring, and that's in no small measure to the open and non-hierarchical environment Richard has worked hard to create. I can't be in the studio on Monday due to teaching commitments, but I look forward to being back at rehearsals on Tuesday.
So stay tuned for more.
P
Not that I regret for a moment being there the rest of this past week. It's such an exciting--and terrifying--thing to dive into the rehearsal process. The exploration and moments of discovery are so stimulating; at the same time, one is always in a bit of a panic about the steadily diminishing amount of time one has for said exploration and discovery. In our case, because there are so many different moving parts to the production--not the least of which is creating and learning actual physical movement--juggling available time is one of Richard's main priorities. Fortunately, choreographer Lesley Telford hit the ground running during the first three days of rehearsal, aided by the emerging dance artists from her Arts Umbrella class with whom she has been building much of the choreography for the show, and many of whom have very generously agreed to accompany Lelsey to our rehearsals to help teach the material to the actors. And in this respect, one of the delights so far has been to watch the dancers' and actors' mutual admiration for each other's specific performance gifts. The entire cast has done an amazing, and exceedingly fast, job of absorbing into their bodies some fairly difficult physical phrases. At the same time, they've also absorbed much of the text into their brains, with several of them already off book in terms of their very long monologues. Composer Owen Belton was also present to observe what Lesley was working on in relation to his music, and to get a sense of what he still needed to come up with to accompany the rest of her movement score.
Yesterday we also got a glimpse of Lauchlin Johnston's mock-up of the set, which blew me away with its elegance and beauty. The Gateway's Studio B is not a huge space and we're losing some of that to the backdrop that Lauchlin has created, and that will additionally serve as the surface onto which video designer Jamie Nesbitt's will project his images. One thing Jamie flagged for Lauchlin and Richard was the colour of the floor. If, as originally intended, it remained white, like the backdrop, then it would create a lot of bounce from the lights that would make it hard to see the projections. This would only be exacerbated if, as planned, lighting designer Jergus Oprsal used a series of shins to provide side light from the wings. So the lino floor will now be a light shade of grey. If everything goes accroding to plan the set will be installed by next Thursday, with the lighting grid hung soon after and the cue-to-cue happening much earlier than usual so that the performers will ideally have three full tech runs instead of cramming everything into one half day.
It was also useful to have Jamie at the table yesterday for our final beat-by-beat read-through of the text, as he asked a lot of tough dramaturgical questions about what exactly was going on in different sections, and how video might support them in some instances, or conceivably work against them in others. Combined with the cast's similarly probing questions from the rest of the week, the rigorous text analysis has really forced me to justify my choices, and to explain their relevance to the overall structure of the play and the respective inner worlds of each of the characters. It also required me to not be precious about material that clearly had to go, or about changes to specific lines, however micro or macro. I really appreciate the attentiveness of all involved to my writing, as it has indeed made the work stronger and, in one instance spotted by Keltie, saved me from making a pretty glaring mistake in the math!
Lots more work to do, of course, but so far the process has been thoroughly rewarding. The level of collegiality and collaboration on everyone's part has been inspiring, and that's in no small measure to the open and non-hierarchical environment Richard has worked hard to create. I can't be in the studio on Monday due to teaching commitments, but I look forward to being back at rehearsals on Tuesday.
So stay tuned for more.
P
Sunday, October 16, 2016
The Flick at Granville Island Stage
I admit to hitherto being a somewhat skeptical celebrant at the church of Annie Baker, the thirtysomething American playwriting phenom who has taken the New York stage by storm with her extreme, almost hyper-naturalistic portraits of everyday folks going about their banally uninteresting lives, and struggling to make connections in language that is acutely and often painfully attuned to the prosaic speech patterns of our current digital age (lots of "likes" and "uhms" and many many pauses). The 2012 Arts Club production of Circle Mirror Transformation, the play that made Baker's name, struck me as disingenuously ingenuous in its unstudied approach to the baring of the inner lives of a group of amateur mechanicals in Vermont who find themselves part of a community centre theatrical workshop--and in my recollection that was only partly the fault of Nicola Cavendish's weak direction. However, the Arts Club's current production of The Flick, the play that won Baker the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, has made me rethink my assessment. The play contains all of Baker's trademark anti-theatrical conceits--long pauses, quotidian dialogue, real-time action in which nothing really happens--but this time there is more depth to her characters, not to mention the development of real dramatic tension between them. In this regard, the playwright seems to have substituted what I previously took to be winking irony for sincere empathy. She also embeds within this play a cogent aesthetic and socio-economic critique.
The Flick is set in a single-screen movie theatre in a small town in Massachusetts, one of the last such venues in the state that still shows 35 millimetre films. The plot centres on three main characters, all employees at the cinema. Avery, played by a superb Jesse Reid, is an upper-middle class college-age black man who is just starting out. Avery is a cinematic savant, with a deep knowledge of and affinity for the movies, but only those made on and projected as celluloid. He is also socially awkward in a way that suggests he resides somewhere on the autism spectrum, his phobias about shit and his depression about the breakup of his parents' marriage belying much deeper anxieties about the state of the world. Sam, a veteran employee in his thirties, is in charge of training Avery, which mainly consists of handing him a broom and waste bin into which to sweep the popcorn and other detritus left behind by the theatre's patrons (only one of whom, played by Aaron Paul Stewart, we ever see). Sam has never been to college and still lives with his parents, and Haig Sutherland portrays the character's affronted weariness, not to mention genuine woundedness, at the lot life has handed him (including at one point a painful skin rash) with a quiet dignity that by the end of the play almost makes Sam appear heroic. The third main character in the play is Rose, the projectionist, a super-sexual free spirit for whom Sam pines, but who only seems to have eyes for Avery. Shannon Chan-Kent manages the difficult trick of making Rose seem at once an unattainable romantic goddess (that she spends much of her time moving about silently in the illuminated projection booth of Lauchlin Johnston's amazing set helps on this front) and a flesh and blood desiring woman intent on getting what she wants (cue a hilarious seen of Rose twerking in front of Avery).
The inevitable romantic triangle becomes the most immediate source of dramatic conflict in the play, which stretches three hours and involves multiple scenes of Avery and Sam silently sweeping up popcorn. But it is part of Baker's durational method to show us that in the midst of these apparently trivial scenes of repetitive and routinized labour, and the "ordinary affects" that accompany that labour (to quote from the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart), things erupt without warning to throw us--and our characters--off course. What's more, the play suggests that these personal eruptions are actually symptomatic of a larger neoliberal ideology that, to quote another fancy-shmancy affect theorist, Lauren Berlant, conspire to keep folks like Sam especially in a constant state of "cruel optimism," perpetually longing for the thing they want, but which they are perpetually denied, or told they cannot have. Thus, Rose's clumsy attempted seduction of Avery during a weekend that Sam is away at a family wedding sets off a chain of mutual recriminations that actually climaxes in a tense scene in which race and class are set against each other as part of a zero-sum equation of employee solidarity versus individual self-interest. That is, the new owner of the movie theatre, having first announced his decision to move exclusively to digital projection (something that causes Avery physical pain), subsequently accuses Avery of being solely responsible for skimming off a portion of box office proceeds under the previous management, a scheme into which he was very reluctantly conscripted by Rose and Sam when he first started his job (because, as Rose puts it, "No one can live on $8.50 an hour"). Avery thinks the new boss is targeting him because he is black and wants his coworkers to come clean on the fact that they were also part of the plan, in the hopes that they'll all be forgiven. However, Rose suggests that there is less at stake for Avery because he is the son of well-paid academic whose tuition is free and who is only working this job as a hobby, whereas for her and Sam this is their livelihood. For his part, Sam sheepishly notes that Avery said he'd quit anyway if the place stopped screening actual celluloid films.
All of this is accomplished without any flashy screaming and yelling, just a simmering stand-off that is telegraphed mostly through silently accusatory glances. And it is to director Dean Paul Gibson's immense credit that he is able to get his actors to say so much with just the subtlest movements of their bodies, a slump of the shoulders or a refusal to turn around or the hanging of a head communicating so economically--but no less affectingly--defeat or pride or hurt. As Avery notes to Sam in a brief coda at the end of the play, these characters have been thrown together by circumstance, and that circumstance--a minimum wage job in a soon-to-be obsolete service industry--conspires against the chance of them ever becoming real friends. Given that, the kindnesses we do witness between the characters--including the one Sam makes to Avery at the very end--register as all the more powerful.
This is a superb production of a very thoughtful play. It deserves to be seen.
P
The Flick is set in a single-screen movie theatre in a small town in Massachusetts, one of the last such venues in the state that still shows 35 millimetre films. The plot centres on three main characters, all employees at the cinema. Avery, played by a superb Jesse Reid, is an upper-middle class college-age black man who is just starting out. Avery is a cinematic savant, with a deep knowledge of and affinity for the movies, but only those made on and projected as celluloid. He is also socially awkward in a way that suggests he resides somewhere on the autism spectrum, his phobias about shit and his depression about the breakup of his parents' marriage belying much deeper anxieties about the state of the world. Sam, a veteran employee in his thirties, is in charge of training Avery, which mainly consists of handing him a broom and waste bin into which to sweep the popcorn and other detritus left behind by the theatre's patrons (only one of whom, played by Aaron Paul Stewart, we ever see). Sam has never been to college and still lives with his parents, and Haig Sutherland portrays the character's affronted weariness, not to mention genuine woundedness, at the lot life has handed him (including at one point a painful skin rash) with a quiet dignity that by the end of the play almost makes Sam appear heroic. The third main character in the play is Rose, the projectionist, a super-sexual free spirit for whom Sam pines, but who only seems to have eyes for Avery. Shannon Chan-Kent manages the difficult trick of making Rose seem at once an unattainable romantic goddess (that she spends much of her time moving about silently in the illuminated projection booth of Lauchlin Johnston's amazing set helps on this front) and a flesh and blood desiring woman intent on getting what she wants (cue a hilarious seen of Rose twerking in front of Avery).
The inevitable romantic triangle becomes the most immediate source of dramatic conflict in the play, which stretches three hours and involves multiple scenes of Avery and Sam silently sweeping up popcorn. But it is part of Baker's durational method to show us that in the midst of these apparently trivial scenes of repetitive and routinized labour, and the "ordinary affects" that accompany that labour (to quote from the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart), things erupt without warning to throw us--and our characters--off course. What's more, the play suggests that these personal eruptions are actually symptomatic of a larger neoliberal ideology that, to quote another fancy-shmancy affect theorist, Lauren Berlant, conspire to keep folks like Sam especially in a constant state of "cruel optimism," perpetually longing for the thing they want, but which they are perpetually denied, or told they cannot have. Thus, Rose's clumsy attempted seduction of Avery during a weekend that Sam is away at a family wedding sets off a chain of mutual recriminations that actually climaxes in a tense scene in which race and class are set against each other as part of a zero-sum equation of employee solidarity versus individual self-interest. That is, the new owner of the movie theatre, having first announced his decision to move exclusively to digital projection (something that causes Avery physical pain), subsequently accuses Avery of being solely responsible for skimming off a portion of box office proceeds under the previous management, a scheme into which he was very reluctantly conscripted by Rose and Sam when he first started his job (because, as Rose puts it, "No one can live on $8.50 an hour"). Avery thinks the new boss is targeting him because he is black and wants his coworkers to come clean on the fact that they were also part of the plan, in the hopes that they'll all be forgiven. However, Rose suggests that there is less at stake for Avery because he is the son of well-paid academic whose tuition is free and who is only working this job as a hobby, whereas for her and Sam this is their livelihood. For his part, Sam sheepishly notes that Avery said he'd quit anyway if the place stopped screening actual celluloid films.
All of this is accomplished without any flashy screaming and yelling, just a simmering stand-off that is telegraphed mostly through silently accusatory glances. And it is to director Dean Paul Gibson's immense credit that he is able to get his actors to say so much with just the subtlest movements of their bodies, a slump of the shoulders or a refusal to turn around or the hanging of a head communicating so economically--but no less affectingly--defeat or pride or hurt. As Avery notes to Sam in a brief coda at the end of the play, these characters have been thrown together by circumstance, and that circumstance--a minimum wage job in a soon-to-be obsolete service industry--conspires against the chance of them ever becoming real friends. Given that, the kindnesses we do witness between the characters--including the one Sam makes to Avery at the very end--register as all the more powerful.
This is a superb production of a very thoughtful play. It deserves to be seen.
P
Monday, September 19, 2016
Long Division Workshop
I don't know why it's taken me so long to announce on this blog that my new play is being produced this fall. I guess I didn't want to jinx anything. But after last week, one of the most intense and rewarding of my writing life, I think I can finally let Schrödinger's cat out of its box (bad inside joke).
My play is called Long Division and it is being produced by Pi Theatre in association with the Gateway in Richmond, where it will open on November 17 (get your tickets here). We don't begin rehearsals until October 24, but as part of the creative process our director Richard Wolfe had blocked off a week-long workshop with the actors in early September so that we could collectively dig our hands into the script, and so that I could respond to their comments and queries with rewrites as needed.
I can't disclose just yet who those actors are (I believe an announcement from Pi is imminent), but I can say that there are seven of them. For a long time I thought the size of the cast meant the play would never be produced. But now that I've met our actors--all of them amazing talents whose past work on stages across this city I've so admired--and heard them speak my lines, I can't conceive of having written the piece any other way.
The ensemble nature of the play is closely tied to its subject matter: a chain reaction of events that has thrown seven otherwise mostly disconnected characters into an enforced relationship with each other and, consequently, an accounting of what role they each may have played in precipitating--or not forestalling--said events. To do so, they use the language of mathematics, and the play has been partly constructed as an equation to be solved, with characters addressing the audience in a series of monologues that alternate with choral scenes that attempt to offer further lessons in what one of the books I consulted in the course of my research has called "the science of patterns."
One thing became immediately clear after Richard, the actors, our stage manager, Jethelo Cabilete, and several of the designers gave their feedback following the initial table read last Monday: some of the mathematics in the play had to be simplified and, more to the point, couldn't just be included in a "hey, isn't this cool" manner. It always needed to be in the service of the story and both the actors and the characters delivering the math lessons needed to understand what they were saying, and why. The actors' questions on what this or that concept meant forced me to explain things in more concrete, real-world ways, and often that very language found its way into the play.
As useful was the consensus note to create more of a balance between the cool and somewhat analytical feel of the math lessons and the warmer, more emotionally involving human stories that were being shared. I needed to find a way to make the structural dialectics of the play more compelling for the audience, to both suggest why these characters (only one of whom is a mathematician) might turn to numbers and geometry and the like as a way to abstract and make sense of an event that is still too painful to contemplate fully, and when and why the weight of that pain refuses to fit into neat and tidy patterns. In the course of these revisions, especially, I was able to begin refining the connections between the characters, tweaking each of the monologues to add greater individual clarity and depth, but also collectively to suggest how these folks are constellated as parts of a whole.
On this front, what was most exciting for me was to see how the actors responded to my new pages each day, discovering in my revisions added layers of complexity and vulnerability for each of their characters and, most thrillingly, bringing that out in their subsequent readings. It is such an amazing thing for a playwright to hear his or her words lifted off the page for the first time, and with this play in particular there are lots of choral moments where very conceptually and emotionally loaded lines have to be lobbed quickly and deftly back and forth between characters. Fortunately this crackerjack ensemble is more than up to the task.
After a shorter day on Thursday, which was mostly devoted to a publicity photo shoot with David Cooper (who is a wizard with the camera), Richard and I met with the dramaturg who has been working with me on the script for the past several years, my friend and colleague DD Kugler. Kugler's notes were, as usual, spot-on, and combined with what the actors and Richard had already given me by way of feedback, I had lots of material to attack in a more holistic way a comprehensive revision of the entire draft. This I undertook via a late night of writing on Thursday and some early Friday morning tinkering. Richard and I stopped to make some photocopies on the way to the Gateway and as I distributed the new scripts to the actors I held my breath a bit in anticipation of how this version would land. It was clear from everyone's reactions after the last line was spoken that I had definitely cracked a nut and that while there was still more work to be done, a corner had been turned and we were heading in the right direction (which is not just a metaphor in the context of this play).
We did one more reading on Saturday morning, this time with almost the entire production team present, including choreographer Lesley Telford, composer Owen Belton, costume designer Connie Hosie, lighting designer Jergus Oprsal, and set designer Lauchlin Johnston (only projection designer Jamie Nesbitt was absent). A great luxury of this extra workshop time is that it has allowed the entire team to bounce ideas off of each other and, what's more, to do so within the very space--Studio B at the Gateway--where we will be performing (a big shout-out to the Gateway's Jovanni Sy for making this possible). After the morning read and some time for the actors to do some movement exercises with Lesley, the production and design team then had a conversation of what might be possible to achieve within our space (which is intimate) and, as crucially, within the show's overall budget (also not huge, and with such a large cast, most of it needing to be allocated to human resources). Still, the ideas discussed--which I'm not at liberty to reveal--were so exciting. When I started writing this play, I conceived its visual design and movement score as being absolutely integral components--and ones, moreover, that would aid immeasurably in getting across or helping to supplement various math concepts referenced. I'm happy to say everyone else seems to agree.
So, now the ball's back in my court. Over the course of the next week and a bit I've got to turn around a new version of the script. I pretty much know what I have to do, and I'm anxious to get to work. Stay tuned for rehearsal updates beginning the end of October. And I hope to see you at the show.
P
My play is called Long Division and it is being produced by Pi Theatre in association with the Gateway in Richmond, where it will open on November 17 (get your tickets here). We don't begin rehearsals until October 24, but as part of the creative process our director Richard Wolfe had blocked off a week-long workshop with the actors in early September so that we could collectively dig our hands into the script, and so that I could respond to their comments and queries with rewrites as needed.
I can't disclose just yet who those actors are (I believe an announcement from Pi is imminent), but I can say that there are seven of them. For a long time I thought the size of the cast meant the play would never be produced. But now that I've met our actors--all of them amazing talents whose past work on stages across this city I've so admired--and heard them speak my lines, I can't conceive of having written the piece any other way.
The ensemble nature of the play is closely tied to its subject matter: a chain reaction of events that has thrown seven otherwise mostly disconnected characters into an enforced relationship with each other and, consequently, an accounting of what role they each may have played in precipitating--or not forestalling--said events. To do so, they use the language of mathematics, and the play has been partly constructed as an equation to be solved, with characters addressing the audience in a series of monologues that alternate with choral scenes that attempt to offer further lessons in what one of the books I consulted in the course of my research has called "the science of patterns."
One thing became immediately clear after Richard, the actors, our stage manager, Jethelo Cabilete, and several of the designers gave their feedback following the initial table read last Monday: some of the mathematics in the play had to be simplified and, more to the point, couldn't just be included in a "hey, isn't this cool" manner. It always needed to be in the service of the story and both the actors and the characters delivering the math lessons needed to understand what they were saying, and why. The actors' questions on what this or that concept meant forced me to explain things in more concrete, real-world ways, and often that very language found its way into the play.
As useful was the consensus note to create more of a balance between the cool and somewhat analytical feel of the math lessons and the warmer, more emotionally involving human stories that were being shared. I needed to find a way to make the structural dialectics of the play more compelling for the audience, to both suggest why these characters (only one of whom is a mathematician) might turn to numbers and geometry and the like as a way to abstract and make sense of an event that is still too painful to contemplate fully, and when and why the weight of that pain refuses to fit into neat and tidy patterns. In the course of these revisions, especially, I was able to begin refining the connections between the characters, tweaking each of the monologues to add greater individual clarity and depth, but also collectively to suggest how these folks are constellated as parts of a whole.
On this front, what was most exciting for me was to see how the actors responded to my new pages each day, discovering in my revisions added layers of complexity and vulnerability for each of their characters and, most thrillingly, bringing that out in their subsequent readings. It is such an amazing thing for a playwright to hear his or her words lifted off the page for the first time, and with this play in particular there are lots of choral moments where very conceptually and emotionally loaded lines have to be lobbed quickly and deftly back and forth between characters. Fortunately this crackerjack ensemble is more than up to the task.
After a shorter day on Thursday, which was mostly devoted to a publicity photo shoot with David Cooper (who is a wizard with the camera), Richard and I met with the dramaturg who has been working with me on the script for the past several years, my friend and colleague DD Kugler. Kugler's notes were, as usual, spot-on, and combined with what the actors and Richard had already given me by way of feedback, I had lots of material to attack in a more holistic way a comprehensive revision of the entire draft. This I undertook via a late night of writing on Thursday and some early Friday morning tinkering. Richard and I stopped to make some photocopies on the way to the Gateway and as I distributed the new scripts to the actors I held my breath a bit in anticipation of how this version would land. It was clear from everyone's reactions after the last line was spoken that I had definitely cracked a nut and that while there was still more work to be done, a corner had been turned and we were heading in the right direction (which is not just a metaphor in the context of this play).
We did one more reading on Saturday morning, this time with almost the entire production team present, including choreographer Lesley Telford, composer Owen Belton, costume designer Connie Hosie, lighting designer Jergus Oprsal, and set designer Lauchlin Johnston (only projection designer Jamie Nesbitt was absent). A great luxury of this extra workshop time is that it has allowed the entire team to bounce ideas off of each other and, what's more, to do so within the very space--Studio B at the Gateway--where we will be performing (a big shout-out to the Gateway's Jovanni Sy for making this possible). After the morning read and some time for the actors to do some movement exercises with Lesley, the production and design team then had a conversation of what might be possible to achieve within our space (which is intimate) and, as crucially, within the show's overall budget (also not huge, and with such a large cast, most of it needing to be allocated to human resources). Still, the ideas discussed--which I'm not at liberty to reveal--were so exciting. When I started writing this play, I conceived its visual design and movement score as being absolutely integral components--and ones, moreover, that would aid immeasurably in getting across or helping to supplement various math concepts referenced. I'm happy to say everyone else seems to agree.
So, now the ball's back in my court. Over the course of the next week and a bit I've got to turn around a new version of the script. I pretty much know what I have to do, and I'm anxious to get to work. Stay tuned for rehearsal updates beginning the end of October. And I hope to see you at the show.
P
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