Monday!
Monday, June 16th, 2008
Hello again! Monday started out with two new scenes that we began staging right away. Most Ancient and Toby turned out to be the same actor, who, while is still trying to figure out Most Ancients voice, makes an adorable puppy, getting many laughs for simply being on stage.
Up next it was the Young Woman’s three monologues. Monologues are very hard. Especially when the actor is on the phone and has to be believably reacting to someone that the audience can’t hear. Lisa pulled these off flawlessly. She not only has the right timing of the phone call down and the tone of a broken woman, but she can react to the phone call with emotion on her face. A lot of time was spent figuring out the evolution of the woman and physically showing her get stronger.
In every writing class I have taken, the arc of the character is key. They have to continually progress in some way, always have movement, and end up different from how they started, in order to make a play worthwhile and interesting. It’s no question that the characters in Gossamer all change, however I learned that it’s not just the script that moves these characters, but it can also be the staging, appearance and tone of voice. As the Young Woman cleans up her act, she gets higher on stage. She starts out sitting, hunched over on the floor talking on a cell phone, to sitting on a chair, to standing proudly at her new job. It’s a realistic approach to showing a real character because when people change, it affects their whole being and not the words out of their mouths. This may seem obvious, but again, it’s realizing that the obvious actually happens that is mind opening and important.
Another cool thing that is happening during these rehearsals is being able to see Stan, Lois and Cecily O’Neill, the dramaturg, work through the script. It almost becomes a game as to how much can be fixed by a change in the emphasis on a word or a tonal shift, instead of constant rewriting. And it is up to the director to figure out what to tell the actor, so that the problem can be fixed.
It is going through a scene with the notion of finding lines to cut that made everyone question and rationalize what the importance to the story each lines has. This brought out the connectedness of all of the characters and all the back stories leading to an even deeper understanding to the play, and hardly a line cut.
The director’s job is important. Another ridiculously obvious statement, and another thing I wouldn’t have really understood without seeing it first hand. It is up to this person to take the bare bones of a script and flesh it out, which is not as cut and dry as I had believed. Trying to convey a complete background story, as well as emotion on a simple skeleton of words. It is up to the director, as well as the actors, to decide if the skeleton is laughing or jumping or sleeping, because, as I am starting to see, the words that a playwright produces can be taken hundreds of ways. I suppose this is why the characters of Othello and Hamlet and Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar can be performed hundreds of ways.
Obvious realization number two, is how important understanding the background of a character is. This is up to the actor as well as the director, and a good director, as I am witnessing, lets the actor chose this for themselves, a good way for the actor to form leadership over their role. The background is a way to make sense of the characters reactions in the present.
I’m going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art today, I can’t wait. It’s going to be a riot to see the paintings in real life that I had to study on note cards. Again, the studied concept becomes reality.
Olivia