First rehearsal went pretty well, I think. Our director, who I have not worked for before, seems both clever and easygoing. So that’s good.
To follow up on my recent note: Pozzo will appear to be wealthy, at least to the extent of being clean and well-dressed. If you look at performance pictures, there is a wide variety of Pozzo costumes, from outrageous and dandified finery to rags only a little less filthy than Didi and Gogo’s. My Pozzo will be toward the dandified end of things, it seems, which I think suits my performance skills better than rags. However, in the world of the play, I think we’re on the side of there being no wealth or comfort or reliability from which Didi and Gogo and the audience have been excluded. Those things, in our production, do not exist and probably never did.
As for the relationship between Lucky and Pozzo, that remains to be explored. Our director sees Lucky as a kind of Sisyphean hero, which should be interesting for the actor to play, and which should require me to play up Pozzo’s insecurity—his terrible blustering fear that he might not, actually, be in control.
More important, however, is that our director is quite properly focused on the thing being funny. Yes, it’s deep and meaningful and bleak and timeless and all of that, but it’s also fart jokes and pratfalls and hat moves. Our Didi and Gogo hit some very nice rhythms at the first read-through, which is extremely promising.
Also, which is important for me these days, he has no intention of letting rehearsals go on past ten o’clock.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.