Bound: Cast and Clock

Hum. I suppose I should bring y’all up to date on Bound. Our story so far: I wrote the thing, convinced somebody to direct it as a staged reading in a church, and then took out all the cuss words. I think that’s as far as I got. How about the cast?

My Dear Director did the hard work of gathering the cast. Mostly, we talked it out about people we both know and had worked with before. Our Eliezar, then, is the Higgins from Pyggie, and our Satan is the Pickering. I’d seen both of them before, in different things, and she had directed both of them before, and I’m very pleased with them indeed. Our Isaac is the Freddie from Pyggie, who our Dear Director has been working with on a variety of projects since he was but a lad; I like him a lot, and I think he’ll be terrific. I expected Abraham to be the difficult one to cast, since I don’t really know a lot of older actors; we cast the fellow who was dialogue coach for Pyggie. I’ve only seen him in a farce, but she has directed him and seen him in serious things, and he does have a wonderful voice. I think he’ll be very good, but I don’t have any idea what he’ll do with the part. And for Ishmael, we cast a fellow I’ve never met, but who my Dear Director vouches for, and she has wonderful judgment, so there we are.

In order to have a sense of how long the thing is, I had to read it aloud with a stopwatch. That was a bizarre experience. I had read most of it aloud before, of course, and had &#8216heard’ it all in my head as I wrote it, but that was different. And besides, it had been months and months since I read the thing through in order—I had been concentrating on individual lines and bits and scenes, and besides had largely put the thing aside since last winter.

And then it turned out to be long. I had copied a format that is supposed to be roughly a minute a page, and the script is a hundred pages, so I was thinking it was roughly an hour and a half. My Personal Dramaturge thought it was shorter, without clocking it, but based on quite a bit of script-reading experience. My Dear Director wanted to know if there would need to be an intermission, which is reasonable enough, so out with the old stopwatch and on with the vocals.

Digression: I was using an old stopwatch from my Best Reader’s father, who had been a time-study man at a factory. It’s a great stopwatch, with a big dial and a big button, and I hadn’t noticed right away that the dial was marked off in hundreds rather than sixties. That is, if at the end of the scene, the dial showed ten times around the dial, that didn’t mean ten minutes, but 1000 seconds, or sixteen minutes and forty seconds. I can imagine that being tremendously helpful to a time-study man, and I can do simple arithmetic with a calculator, but it was disconcerting to discover, when I was most of the way through, that I had no idea how long I had been going on. Silly old non-metric clocks. End Digression.

It turned out, once I had done the simple arithmetic, that the thing took me two hours to read. The first two acts together are an hour, and the third act is an hour, and that’s two hours, with an intermission halfway through. I suspect if I get to put on a whole production, with blocking and props and everything, I’ll have to cut vast chunks out of it, probably cutting at least fifteen minutes out of the third act and ten out of the first two. Well, that’s what this whole exercise is about. I’ll get to see what drags and what works. And we’ll see if it goes faster with actors. I wouldn’t say I’m notorious for slow speaking, but I’m certainly willing to take my time and create a silence to speak into. And although I was willing to skip bits of lines to approximate overlapping speech, I can’t actually overlap lines, which may make a difference, too.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.