Goodbye and Still More Goodbye - Mar 5 Blocking 4

Today I want to talk about process.

In particular, I am pondering the emotional journey and access of the director during the blocking process. If we accept that the director needs to be the perfect audience, to provide a mirror to the actors to reflect and refract their work through the emotional prisms of an engaged reactor, what is the effect of the director's own emotional state on the rehearsal and blocking process?

(I feel the need to interrupt myself to assure anyone who might read these words that last night's rehearsal was very well met, both Scene 12 Postman's Park and Scene 8 Restaurant are fully sketched out and very well blocked - amazingly so. In retrospect it was remarkable how the cast instincts and my own were in such harmony. In one case, (carefully trying to avoid spoilers in case someone unfamiliar with the script reads these words) I placed a bench onstage just left of CS and gave minimal instruction to orient the actors to the other objects in the park. I gave the actors a exploratory run of the full scene - my preferred method to start work, gives the cast room to play and find challenges, and me the chance to look for instincts and ideas that will build the best possible stage picture. Without prompting, the improvised staging was virtually identical to the staging notes I had prepared and visualized. It was almost eerie. All this to say, we had a very productive evening, finished early, and are ready to take these two challenging scenes to the microscopic test of detail and polish work.)

It is evident to anyone involved in theatrical creation that the emotional atmosphere of the rehearsal hall affects the quality (and quantity, sometimes) of the work. In every show we strive to make our rehearsal process as open and creative as possible. We are making a breathing imaginary world from the intangible mutable invisible world of our own emotions. We read words on paper and interpret those ink splats to pretend people, pretend places, pretend feelings. In a play with such passionate and painful emotional landscapes as Closer, it takes guts to pull out those emotional wisps and fashion them into a new and unsettling combinations. Everyone involved in the process has to find their own technique and method to build their section - the designers need to imagine the visual and aural spaces, the actors need to craft a complicated person, and the director needs to make sure the brave new world has cohesion and supports all the ink splots. As we all interpret our own stream, the director needs to build a valve to process all the streams and blend them to one wide river. One of the major tools for this is the ability to both connect and disconnect to the work at will. As the professional audience member, the director needs to be able to experience the work as new and unfamiliar every single time she sees it. As the master stager, the director needs to master the text, understand the characters both the writer and actors struggle to create, and be able to synthesize this connection to the physical worlds envisioned by the designer. One minute - completely plugged into your own work and the work of everyone around you (those in the room and those whose work happens outside the hall) the director shapes the theatical narrative, the next she is wiped clean and needs to watch the action unfold with virgin eyes.

With that sense of the director's role, what happens to the director's own emotional state? Many best practices advise us all to leave other concerns at the rehearsal room door so we can devote our energy to the show and the tasks at hand. Yesterday I found myself with a larger plate of stressors than usual - not show related, just life colliding with life. I can usually summon enough focus to shake off the real world while I am inventing imaginary ones, but that real world was too much with me. I want to emphasize again it was nothing show-related, all personal stuff I won't get into here. But these were the sort of emotional loose ends that flap around and give you whiplash. It took tremendous energy to watch and respond to the work of my colleagues. I know as I tried to clear myself to see the work anew I was not a blank slate, but a person with troubles of her own, so to speak.

So does this emotional awareness help or hinder the process? One tangible result was that I did not have the energy to push on when we finished the called scenes early. It would have been nice to get a jump on the museum scene, but I was not emotionally prepared and nimble enough to make the leap. In this sense, it may be a hinderance. On the other hand, audiences are not automatons. They each will bring their own baggage into the house. I now have a physical idea of how the emotionally charger reactors may receive the actors' work - an insight that may help the detail work for the final monologue.

I've worked halls where a pissed off director trampled actors and scenework. I've worked halls where a smitten director can't stop their libido buzzing long enough to solve an actor's quick change problem. I've worked halls where internal tensions poisoned all the work and made it unbearable. I take all those experiences to heart and strive to make my halls productive and responsive, both engaged and detached. My own moody blues last night have me thinking about the value of the director's feeling to the bigger process. While we cannot be slaves to feeling, there may be merit in better understanding how those moods can affect reception and communication.

Need to do something wacky and fun on the day off, Sunday's a big day!