Blocking blocking

We are working through the first rehearsals of the play, setting the blocking. "Blocking" means who goes where, when, and how they get there. We set aside character development and voice production, and stumble around the stage trying to figure out how to get the available actors from one interesting and compelling visual arrangement into the next one, with the least fuss possible.

My script has a series of mysterious pencil glyphs down the right margin. They are, mainly, the first initials of the characters currently on stage, arranged as from an overhead view. And then there are scrawled arcing arrows and musical notes to try to remind me what I want the speed and feel of an action to be like. I am very impressed that the actors are picking up so quickly and smoothly what I am throwing at them from this hen-scrawl.

Our stage is small and the main entrance for the actors is through the audience. There is one other exit that only one actor gets to use, so there are some real traffic issues as people come and go. However, I think this is going to come together nicely.

I think we will finish blocking act 2 tonight, a day ahead of my schedule. Then we can start going crazy with voices, characterizations, and finding the noisy and quiet, the fast and the slow bits in every scene.

More than a month to go, still. Pleeeenty of time...

Table reading

We had a table reading of 'The Straight Line' last night at a local coffee shop after it closed for the day (April, part of the cast and pictured below, works in the cafe). Jerry, the author, read the part of Jim as I haven't found the right actor for that part yet.


The reading went far, far better than I had thought it might--often, first read-throughs are slack in energy and suffer from technical issues (more actors than you would think possible have reading difficulties). I enjoyed myself a lot, and look forward to the start of rehearsals. I have started a Facebook site to track the progress of the show. If you are on Facebook, search 'groups' for

Image Theater's "The Straight Line"

and get the latest news shortly after it happens.

Five and holding

So the actor I auditioned on Friday can't do the show. We have options, but it does mean we go into tonight's first meeting, the read-through, one actor short.

This is not the worst of all possible worlds. A few years ago we were doing John Bowen's Fall and Redemption of Man, with a cast of twelve playing 58 parts. The night before we were to open, one of the cast was arrested for non-appearance in some court case somewhere, and disappeared from our universe. So now we had eleven actors to play 58 parts.

We canceled the first performance, and after a fevered day of reassignments I had the parts re-parceled so that nobody had to talk to himself, and we opened the show. It was exhausting, but people loved it and we toured it here and there in western Massachusetts. It's a show I would love to do again, but without the sheriffs.

What the characters say

I am trying to understand "The Straight Line", the new play I am directing. This is the world premiere, so I don't have any other interpretations or body of performances to go on. So I am using all sorts of tools to see what they tell me.

As an exercise, I took the text of the play, removed the characters' names, and passed it through Wordle. The result is this visualization of the text:


The prominence of the word "know" was a surprise, that's for sure.

(Click on the image to see it in a larger and clearer format)

Five out of six

Got the other actress I wanted. So now it's down to the tomorrow guy...

Four out of Six

Okay, so now I am painting myself in a corner by settling on actor four for the fourth part without seeing the guy who will audition tomorrow. But I am hoping for him for one of the two remaining open parts. Hoping hoping hoping.

Didn't want to let actor four slip away into some other production while I was dithering.

Three out of six

The play I'm directing has six characters. I'd like to start rehearsals with a table reading early next week, but at this point I've only cast three of the parts. There are a couple of good actors who want to audition, but I won't see them until Friday. In the meantime, will one of the good actors I already saw get cast in something else and become unavailable?

One of the really strong signs that I am gaining wisdom as I get older is that it has only once so far occurred to me that I could simplify the process by playing one of the parts myself. As well as directing. I used to do this a lot, back in the days of blind ambition.

Hand quandary

So I have this meeting on Friday with people I have never met before and with whom I would like to have a continuing relationship. And I have spent the last several days crawling around on a former factory floor, hauling nails and trashing old carpet and laying down a couple of layers of paint so it can turn into my wife's new painting studio (she has an existing studio on the fifth floor of the same old factory building, but is moving down to the second floor, nearer to the gallery and just a long reach above the canal that runs beside the building).

From all that crawling and hauling and painting, my hands are a mess. I think I can get them to lose the very odd color (sort of a faded yellow) they are now exhibiting, without scrubbing the skin clear off. But do I decorate myself in band-aids to cover all the nicks and gashes, so I look like I just got out of Outpatients? Or do I leave the nicks and gashes on display (manly stoicism) and hope I don't run into someone who hates the sight of blood?

I could wear opera gloves...

Audition Scenes

I'm directing a new play, and auditions are tonight. The play had a well-received staged reading in New Hampshire a few months ago, but aside from the folks who attended that, nobody has ever seen this thing on stage in any way. And over the last week the playwright heroically rewrote several sections to address some logic issues that had come up, so what people are auditioning for tonight is something nobody has ever auditioned for before.

I spent part of the day printing out excerpts, bits of scenes that will allow us to focus on, say, an actor and actress presenting Jeff and Bridget in a tense romantic/combative scene, without having other people on stage holding scripts and feeling useless. I have a coded master document so I can keep track of my 9 audition scenes, and someone else has promised to bring copies of the standard form the actors will fill out (previous experience, days when you can't rehearse, what you've acted in recently).

By Thursday, with any luck, we will have a cast. Then we will have until opening night, May 1, to put it all together and rock the house.

I'll keep you posted.