An Entry that gets a bit Technical

So, for you, Gentle Reader, to grasp the point Your Humble Blogger would like to make, you’ll need a trifle of background about How the Rehearsal Process Works. Those Gentle Readers who are familiar with this sort of thing, and there are at least a few of you who have more experience than I do at this sort of thing, can skip a paragraph or so.

You see, for most of the shows I’ve been involved in, the rehearsal process begins with a period of scrounging rehearsal space wherever we can get it. Oh, sometimes, if the show is in a nice place with a rehearsal room, we get an actual rehearsal room, and sometimes we rehearse in somebody’s living room, or we use a church basement or a room in a parks and rec center. We actually get onto the stage something like two weeks before opening night, if we’re lucky. If we’re really lucky, the place is dark for those two weeks, and we can put up the permanent set and leave it up. If not, we work around the set of the show that’s closing, or we take stuff down and put it up, using up some valuable rehearsal time. Once we actually get the set up, and the lights, and the props and everything, we have what is ideally referred to as Tech Week, or if you only have the one night, “the technical”. This can be a tedious business for an actor, as it involves a good deal of standing around whilst the lights are focused on you and interminable waits between scenes whilst the assistant stage manager runs around taking care of everything that needs to be altered between scenes and the stage manager writes everything down, or rather crosses out all the stuff that had been carefully prepared but is now useless because of some last-minute change and writing down the new stuff.

So. This is the second show I’ve been in with this group and this director in this small town in Western Connecticut. And the thing about this small town in Western Connecticut is that it has a small but underused community center with a proscenium stage. In fact, it’s so underused that we have it largely to ourselves. And with doing only two or three shows a year, we can pretty much build the set whenever we like, and leave it up as long as we like. So, together with a luxuriously long rehearsal schedule of something like nine weeks, all of which is actually on the stage on which we will be performing, we have much of that time on the set itself. For lLD, that means our two turning platforms have been up for weeks, and our furniture has been in place for some time, and the set has been at least half-dressed for much of that. I’ve been able to make my entrances from the actual entrances, sit on the actual chairs, and thrust with the actual foils.

Which, it turns out, completely throws off my sense of where we are in the rehearsal process. Last night, for the first time, we ran through the whole play from egg to apple, and although the teacups weren’t the actual teacups we will be using and so on, we were double-checking the spike marks for the furniture, assigning backstage tasks, and generally doing all the things I think of as belonging to the week before we open. Ten days, at the earliest. And I’m still calling for lines. Which is the most troubling, of course, but deeper than that is that my performance is nowhere near ready for an audience. There are two scenes, at least two, that I have no sense of arc, of movement, of through-line. I’m not comfortable enough in the scenes where I should be comfortable, I’m too angry too early in the scenes where I should be angry, and I’m certainly not funny enough in the scenes where I need to be funny.

There are half-a-dozen lines that I’m still worrying how to deliver. I’m tempted, in the last scene with Madame the Marquise, to read “We made an arrangement” as George C. Scott in the Hustler: “You owe me MONEY!” Revealing, you know, the violent psychopath under the smooth psychopath. It would be effective, I think, although it comes after other expressions of anger and even some physical stuff, and just before he cools way, way down to frosty and elaborate social threats. Also, of course, the Hustler line works, in part, because we’ve come to understand that Mr. Scott’s Bert Gordon really is in it for the money, deep down, and that Fast Eddie Felson really isn’t. The arrangement, itself, is nothing; I’m not even sure that Monsieur the Vicomte cares that much about the sex act that was its subject. Besides, he’s lost by that point, and everybody knows it; shouting may just sound petulant. And, as I say, there are half-a-dozen or more lines like that, lines that may, if I say them right, be pivots to scenes that are pivots to the play, or may be awkward bits of overacting, or may just fade into the audience’s general impressions of who I am and what I want.

And if it were Tech Week, I would have to decide all that Right Now, and as fast decisions don’t allow for experimentation and improvement and second thoughts, at least most of them would be ... not wrong, I won’t say wrong, but imperfect. Less good. In fact, we open four weeks from tonight. I have loads of time. I can play with it all a good deal more before narrowing my options. I feel as if we’re not ready yet, because if it were Tech Week we’d be dreadfully unready, but it isn’t Tech Week, it’s Tech Month. Which is nice, mostly, but I’m a bit lost in it.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.