First Rehearsal
And so it begins. Today I rushed through teaching my last class, jumped in the car, and drove 45 minutes from New Hampton to the Barnstormers Theatre.

Inside, I found a variety of actors and technicians standing around chatting on the beginnings of the set. I had never been on the stage at the Barnstormers before, having only been to the theatre a couple of times in my life. It's a cozy old theatre, the home to one of the oldest summerstock companies in the country, and a wide variety of companies and acts perform there during the year. (Less so right now, it seems, as the theatre is currently searching for an artistic director.)

I was surprised to see how many high school students were in the play -- I've done shows with Advice to the Players at an outdoor theatre in summers before, but never their winter show, and one of the goals of the winter productions (and a cause for them to get quite a bit of grant money) is to have high schoolers and community members working beside professionals. Thus, Ariel is played by a young woman from town, someone I've actually seen perform before, and who is remarkably talented and focused. (I was kind of hoping Ariel would be male, because he is in the script and yet, despite knowing this, I always think of him as female. Doing a production with a male Ariel, I thought, would solve this misperception for me. I'm just going to have to give up now.) Prospero is played by a woman as well, which ought to make the relationship between Prospero and Ariel interesting to watch textually.

While the producer (the woman playing Prospero, and one of my favorite people in the New Hampshire theatre world, Caroline Nesbitt) and then the director laid out various rules, regulations, and schedules, I took a copy of the script with cut lines in it and collated it with my own script, since the cuts hadn't been sent to me. The cuts were made with the knowledge that a few of our performances will be matinees for local schools, and so some of the more tangential and figurative language has been chopped out. (Very few of Caliban's lines got cut, and nothing I miss.)

Before I started performing in Shakespeare plays with any frequency (if once or twice a year can be said to be frequent), I hated even the idea of cutting the lines. Tamper with the words of The Bard?! What heresy! Any close reading of the plays shows that every line -- every word -- is necessary!

A production must, however, take into account its means and ends. The Shakespeare plays that I have acted in have all benefitted from judicious, and sometimes merciless, cutting. The theatre is at its best when it's a joyfully pragmatic endeavor, one where directors and actors and designers and technicians all recognize they are creating not some Platonic ideal of a play, but specific versions that are given life in actual places and actual times. Some productions could be performed in any place at any time, the actors and stage and audiences all interchangeable with other actors and stages and audiences, but the best theatre can only be performed in one place with one group of people for a certain type of audience. We know who most of our audience will be -- people from central and northern New Hampshire, most of whom are only somewhat familiar with Shakespeare's work, if at all. If we do our job right, we're going to give our audiences a play that excites, amuses, and moves them here and now, not in England in a theatre without a roof or electricity in the early seventeenth century.

After getting organized and dealing with details, then doing a short physical and vocal warm-up, the director began the rehearsal. He had decided to jump right in without a read-through, and this is a decision I tend to support, particularly with Shakespeare when people who are not experienced with early modern English are among the actors. Simply reading through an entire Shakespeare play can be arduous in such circumstances. Even with modern plays (for instance, Beckett's Endgame, which I directed a few years ago), I will sometimes move right into work without a read-through. It's remarkable how fresh and surprising the text can be when everybody starts out on their feet.

Though we aren't necessarily going to be rehearsing the play in order, we began with the first scene, which is fairly large, as it involves most of the main characters plus some sailors and spirits. The storm was choreographed with large strips of thin white fabric to be carried over the audience's heads by the spirits. Timing this with the lines and various necessary movements took about an hour, during which time I tried to memorize a few lines, since I'm not quite sure when I'll have time to do so much before the performance. (I always feel this way. I always find time. I always hate it. It's the worst part of acting -- memorizing lines. The only technique that really works for me is the most arduous: memorizing one clause, then moving on to the next clause, then going back to make sure I have the first and doing the two together, then continuing to add, always going back to reinforce what was learned earlier. Once I think I've got the lines down, I go back with an index card and read through the script, stopping after every cue line to make sure I know the cues, then trying my own lines and checking them against the script. Inevitably, once I get on stage, I forget half of what I learned, but the prompting of the stage manager helps solidify them, and once I've got the lines connected to my sense of the stage as a physical object, then the magic begins and I stop worrying about lines altogether, because I can trust that I have them. Sometimes I get surprised or muddled and go up on a line, but by that point, I know the character and situations well enough to be able to get through it. Improvising iambic pentameter can be an interesting challenge when an entire audience is watching...)

After watching the rehearsal for a bit, I began to worry. I could see that the director's style was very different from my preferred one. This isn't necessarily a problem -- I've worked with many directors who direct in ways I never would, and the friction of trying to fit myself into their process produces interesting results more often than not. In fact, the best play I've ever acted in, a college production of Jeffrey by Paul Rudnick (I was the title character), I nearly quit half-way through because I didn't feel like the director and I were communicating about anything. The play had the worst dress rehearsal I've ever been part of -- we seriously considered cancelling it. And then opening night it all came together. I can't speak for why it worked for everybody else, but I know for me, my goal became to prove the director wrong, since I didn't think he thought my performance was very good. (We won a bunch of awards and had audiences lining up for tickets an hour before the play every night after the opening, so something must have worked.)

Anyway, the problem I saw for myself with The Tempest was different. Our director has planned out all of the blocking (movements) beforehand, and so most of what he spent the rehearsal doing was telling people where to move on most of their lines. Frankly, I hate this. It makes me surly and anxious and annoyed. I like to use rehearsals to play around, to try out everything I can think of and see how it works, to get things wrong more often than right. When I direct, I seldom even write in a script until it comes time to set light and sound cues, and I hardly ever write down blocking. If a movement is so important that I need to command it, I figure I will have communicated well enough with an actor that the movement will seem self-evident, and therefore they will never forget it, and I will never have to write it down. (Yes, this is an ideal. But it works more often than not.)

I finished directing a production of The Glass Menagerie a few weeks ago, and mostly only told the actors where to enter and exit, since we needed to know for the lighting. The majority of the other lighting cues came from the actors' movements, and those weren't set in stone. It means both the actors and technicians need to understand the rhythms and cause/effect stucture of the play, which can sometimes be difficult, but once they get it the results can be phenomenal.

So here I am, having directed a show this way myself for about six weeks, and now I have to adjust to being an actor for a director who gives very specific blocking. I can intellectualize why this is important -- we've only got two-and-a-half weeks of rehearsals, after all -- but as we got closer and closer to my entrance in I.ii, I got more and more anxious.

When I entered though and tried out some movements, played a bit with the voice, and tried to get a sense of my relationship with the other actors, it worked out okay. I only got a few specific directions (and promises of, "Well, we'll choreograph that later..."), and I agreed with them all. Afterward, the director said, "Would you mind being on all fours more? Prospero's the one who taught him to walk upright. I think he might only do that when forced." I said I'd be happy to try -- it sounded like a fun challenge. And that was it -- no time for more. Tomorrow, we'll be doing most of the Stephano/Trinculo/Caliban scenes.

The costume designer, who seems like a very nice woman, asked me sheepishly if I would mind if my costume showed a bit of skin. I almost said, thinking again of Jeffrey, "I once was in a play that opened with me in bed with six guys, and I spent a lot of time wearing nothing but boxer shorts. I don't think showing a bit of skin will kill me." (The glare might blind people in the front row, though.) Instead, I just said I didn't think it would be a problem.

Meanwhile, driving home I heard on the radio that a winter storm warning is in effect, and we're to expect somewhere between a foot and two feet of snow between 8pm tonight and 8pm tomorrow. Fun. Luckily, rehearsal isn't until 3.30pm (most of the roads should have been cleared by then), and my car is an all-wheel-drive Subaru.

I thought I'd also chronicle a bit of the music I have listened to on the drive, since I often use it as preparation. Driving up, I listened to Radu Lupu playing Brahms, a CD that was a Christmas present and has quickly become a favorite, particularly the Rhapsody in G Minor (Alex Ross has written glowingly about this album and Lupu's playing). On the way home, I considered listening to Bob Dylan's Royal Albert Hall concert, which has been playing in my car for a day or two (after I got fed up with Tori Amos's latest album), but decided on NHPR, a good choice, it turned out, because Bradley Dean, a Thoreau scholar, was on "The Front Porch" program, and I adore just about anything having to do with Thoreau.

Well, it's almost nine o'clock now. No snow yet... 

¶ 8:49 PM