Until it Shines Like The Top of the Chrysler Building - Polish 1, March 17

First, apologies all around for the missing days of rehearsal updates. A series of unfortunate events and coincidences which are neither enlightening nor amusing conspired to make the blog updates fall behind. If I had a cool story explaining why I had to wait to pick up the thread now, I would insert it ****here****. Alas, no such story exists, so it's a better use of time and bandwidth to just jump on in to the current work.

Second, I am hopped up on OTC cold remedies. This may make me overly whimsical or verbal. Apologies there too. Upside? The first person who comments on this note revealing the pop culture reference I used to title this update gets a Tim Bit of my choice, delivered either in rehearsal or I will bring it to you on opening night.

We are blocked - in the good way, as in the basic physical structure of the actor's movements have been scored and set. I will be making adjustments as we go through, based on set configurations and narrative clarification, but it is heartwarming to know we have the foundation in place. Now we have moved on to the exciting work of polish.

It's a slow start, as we focused on one major scene last night. Nevertheless, it was a pivot moment, so it felt great to get it nailed. It was an all-boys night, and while I attended to some production details D and S ran Scene 3 Internet and Scene 10 Surgery as Italian runs. D reports that they had the typing in 3 down to six minutes, which is a remarkable feat. Also, good to know, as the timing of that scene needs an audience of fresh eyes to answer some pacing questions. I am curious to see what it will run as with viewers who are unfamiliar with the text. This will likely determine how the actors gauge and time their responses - the laughs will need accommodation, but this is an unusual situation. Both D and S commented that it was neat to be doing something they had never done on stage before - and I agree, the challenge is pretty cool.

Scene 10 had a more thorough scrubbing, though we did not make it to the end. Here's a process question for you - how do you support an actor who is commanded by the stage directions to break down sobbing? I've encountered this situation before, and I don't think there is a cookie cutter director manual answer. First, you need to know why the playwright (if indeed it was the playwright and not simply an early production director with a fondness for waterworks) includes that stage direction. Like any other event in the script, it needs to follow the internal logic of the play. With Marber, who was the original director anyway, the stage directions are precise and significant. I haven't found a single one that felt contrived or artificial to the world of the play. This is a gift, as with many scripts you need to question the validity of the stage direction to determine if the described gesture or event is necessary for the action, and to which action it serves. In the case of Dan's breakdown in 10, it is clear that it must happen for Larry to truly triumph. Therefore, the factors that push Dan to lose emotional control - crying, not shouting, less common for male characters - need to be in place. I wanted this to be clearer, and so I tried to focus on the beat by beat actions at the top of the scene. There needed to be more fight in it, so he had more to risk. This scene has a danger of playing the end - once you know what Larry reveals about the girls, it is easy to get caught up the emotional consequences for Dan. But there needs to be real conflict at the beginning for the scene to have room to dance.

Getting back to my question of supporting an actor through a difficult and specific stage direction - in this case I decided to organize the scene so that he approached that moment defeated but still fighting. The practical application of this is to find ways to balance the emotional intensities throughout the scene so that he can find a specific trigger moment that will work for the character. There's a lovely sinking quality watching a person who knows they are going to learn something terrible, something they ought to have known and shouldn't need to be told. It reads well onstage, and I think will give the audience more of that delicious car-crash fascination we have with humiliation - in this case emotional. Very happy with the work both D and S are bringing to the party to make this happen.

More scenes to polish, more devastation to plot...should be a marvelously bumpy week!