It’s 7pm, I’m sitting at the back of the technical rehearsal, and I’ve had to borrow the Assistant Producer’s power cable because my computer has run out of juice and I really MUST write a blog entry before Jen (SPF marketing supremo and blog-mistress) tells me I can’t have any more frozen mai tais in Chinatown Brasserie over the road from the Public Theater, and not just because last time we did that I ended up lying face down on the floor as part of an elaborate but alas now forgotten joke.
We’re nearing the end of what has been a brilliant, gruelling, exciting and all too short two-week rehearsal process, creating a production in the theatrical equivalent of one of those time-lapse films where a flower goes from bud to bloom in seconds. We did our first run, off book, on the afternoon of the fifth day, by which point God had managed to populate the air and the sea, an undoubtedly bigger achievement than ours, but still I think our first week was pretty extraordinary and we earned our seventh day of rest.
Week two we worked back through the script, cutting and rewriting as we went. Joanna – our brilliant director – has turned out to be a great dramaturg as well, chopping out ‘repeat beats’, having me start scenes without ‘throat-clearing’ and trimming away my occasional diminuendo scene endings, accentuating the script’s habit of beginning and ending scenes in mid-air. She has taught me a great deal about my writing along the way.
The cast have done exceptional work, giving life to the script at great speed and coping with the changes, and the need in this kind of process to rapidly attempt several different readings of a scene. For Aaron Lohr in particular, who is on stage for the entire two-hour play, it’s been an epic undertaking. (It helps that Aaron is an extraordinary line-learner. He arrived off book – I suspect he was born off book – and has then absorbed every line change more or less instantly.)
It’s been fascinating to see a great team of American actors working on this Americanized version of my originally British script. The stereotypical contrast between British and American acting has a fair amount of truth in it. The original London production of Future Me – with a great cast of British actors – was more focused on detail, restraint, the ‘head’, working from the outside in. The American cast drive from the inside out, feeling and reacting. They move more dynamically, conducting energy onto the stage. They have a directness that can at times, as Joanna put it ‘strip the flesh off your bones’. The American production has a physical aspect – a sense of suppressed violence – that I’ve not seen before.
So here we are then – it’s by now 7.45pm on Monday evening and we’re at the start of Act Two. We are testing out a spotlight for the opening scene. Tech rehearsals can be odd for writers, who sit there with nothing to do while their work is deconstructed. Indeed, they can be pretty trying for almost everyone involved, particularly as the evening wears on. But this one is running smoothly. The good humour of the entire team – particularly Joanna the director and Lisa, our super-capable stage manager – is keeping the mood buoyant.
The look and feel of the show is based on a few bold choices. Joanna said to me a couple of days ago: ‘I trust the words. You’ll find that I’ve put your script out there in front of the audience very directly.’ She was warning me not to be freaked out – there are no hiding places in this staging. But it was this clarity and courage that first attracted me to Joanna’s vision in the first place. Now that we are in the space, I can see exactly what she means. The show flows from scene to scene on the back of Stew’s haunting guitar music. There’s no fuss, no clutter, the colours and textures are clean. The actors are offered up to us: human beings struggling in an expanse of space. It’s beautiful.
Posted by 46 at 06:00 PM. Filed under: General • Production • Future Me •
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