Space Age

Rehearsal #13
April 24, 2007

Dear Blog Readers
Today I have to talk to you about space.

We had a long and productive day of rehearsing. It’s the first day of the third week, and now that the whole play is staged, we can go back over what we’ve done, look at scenes all in a row, and start feeling out the bigger picture of the play.

Mark [Blum, who plays Vanya] [We make a lot of jokes about him being the titular character. That's funny if you put all the emphasis on the first syllable of the word, and maybe make your voice really high just for that syllable, and put some shoulder movement in it. Try it with me: titular. Hilarious, right?] [Hey, tiny pleasures in a sea of hard, hard work.]

So Mark talked about how now that he knows where Vanya is emotionally at the end of the play, it affects what he can do with the monologues at the top. He can’t play the end at the beginning. In this case that means if Vanya is facing real depression in Act IV, having attempted murder and then suicide, he has to start somewhere else at the top. He can’t be depressed and exasperated all the way through the play. Something has to change so he can get to that dark place in the end.

I was so excited to hear this, to think of all of us beginning to think of the story on the whole, rather than in separate pieces. Maybe I just have a big-picture kind of a brain, but this is always my favorite part of a rehearsal process. We look at the arc of the whole story, or the arc of a whole character, or of an Act, or of a scene, but it’s the full story now. This is the part that gets my blood going.

So far, this blog entry is just not about space at all. I’m failing you.

What’s important about SPACE is that we went to the theater today and ran some scenes from Act I on the stage! There’s no set, of course, and some walls are still up that will be taken down, but Gordon (wisely) wanted the actors to really get the feel of how truly big the space we’re dealing with is. Because the rehearsal room - though gorgeous and large, especially according to my paltry Manhattan standards [yes, I would love to pay you $200/hour to rehearse in your bathroom, thank you so much for allowing me to do so!] Still, this large rehearsal room is less than half the depth of the stage.

Well, it was a gorgeous experience stepping onto that stage. The energy lifted. They ran through scenes of act I with no props in their hands, no chairs to sit on, but a thrilling energy like the air was made of sugar. We were all grinning from ear to ear when we left for lunch. I once had a directing teacher who told me that he knew he would spend his life in this business because whenever he walked into a theater, even one he had never been to before, he immediately felt at home. Though some members of the Vanya company have acted on this stage before and some have not, we were all at home the moment we walked into that room. The vast space that Michael Yeargan has designed is going to be something thrilling. And now that the actors have that big space in their minds, something changes in their bodies, too.

So that’s space. It took a while, but I got there eventually.
Another late night chatty blog come and gone…