Wednesday 2 – June 6th – Day three

Lots of energy today – I must have adjusted to the schedule.

Plus I went back to Gatorade – I think the sugar helps keep my energy up.

Up at 7:00 out of the room by 8. The weather is nice in the upper 50’s in the morning. New Yorkers are complaining that it is cold. Supposed to hit the 90’s by the weekend.

I walked to Lincoln Center today – it takes about 20 minutes – at a good pace – without running into a lot of people – the sidewalks are full of people in the morning. Stopped at a drugstore to get some toiletries and a bottle of Gatorade.

I got there at 9 am – a full hour before the start and there were lots of others there also.

Had a real good chat with a director from California and I was asking him if his casts spent a week or more at the table before they get on their feet. He said it varies but between 1/4 and ½ of his rehearsal time is spent at the table. I told him I get them up after six hours. I asked him what he does with the 30 to 50 hours. He does the same stuff that I do but I do it during the rehearsal. He goes through the script page by page asking the actors “where are you coming from?, How do you feel about entering? What do you want in this scene?” I do the same but I do it one scene at a time.

We had our second (of three) sessions on ‘Collaboration” today. What a waste of time. We spent the first hour and a quarter reviewing what we did yesterday. Here are a couple of valuable comments I heard during the session today:

In every production someone is in charge and someone is the leader but they may not be the same person.

We talked about the first day of rehearsals and what people covered. The best comment related to establishing “values” for the production. These are set by and agreed to by all in the production. An example is “One of our rehearsal values is being on time.”

A side note: Many of the directors here are confident to the point of arrogance. My guess is that their ability is inversely proportional to their arrogance.

Building a consensus is a subset of Collaboration. Here is what one group said about consensus:

Consensus is dangerous in art because you tend to lose the edges and the edges are what makes art.

One of the good things that comes out of the morning sessions is the small group work. The larger group is broken up into small groups of 3, 4or 5. He rearranges the groups so we get to spend time with and get to know many other people here. Today I spent time with a playwright from the University of Connecticut and a Director from Washington D.C. Really nice people. The playwright has a play he wrote that is running now and he leaves this weekend to see the final week of it. He had a lot of questions about how we, as directors, interpret the work of the playwright. His problem was that the Director had made interpretations of his play that weren’t consistent with the playwrights. Both of us agreed that it is our responsibility to present the playwrights vision of the play as long as the playwright was reasonably available. We could have talked for hours more.

The afternoon program was another of the five plays they have been rehearsing. Yesterday was The Maestro’s Garden. Today was a full fledged musical called Only Children. Roy Thinnes summed it up tonight at our session with him: It would never make Broadway – it is too close to pornography. The musical is about the sexual exploitation of 12 year old children. Pretty graphic in word, deed and song. The 12 year olds were played by young actors in their 20’s. Even the young people in the audience felt “surprisingly Puritan” over it. It was offensive but it did make us think which means that it was good. Remember the comment from the first night that “If everyone in your audience thinks George Bush is great and you present a show that says George Bush is great, what have you accomplished? One of the adult actors said he would not have done the play if he had read it first but “you don’t say ‘no’ when Lincoln enter calls.”

Lincoln Center told us they had picked plays with an edge. I think most people lost sight of the purpose of these plays: To see how the production process works if the playwright is directing the plays assisted by an experienced director. This play went right to the center of my main issue: How does a playwright direct the difficult parts of plays if he has no experience in directing? Interestingly, in this case the playwrights (two – one for music and one for words) did not try to direct. Somehow the Lincoln Center message got translated into “The playwright is in charge of the room.” Many of the sexual scenes would be terribly hard for ANY actor to do and it would take a real caring hand on the part of the director to get the actor to where he/she needed to be.

Definitely, not a play for Orcas – or Doug for that matter but it DID make me think.

We had another three hours with Roy Thinnes tonight in our small group. They gave us a play by John Guare to rehearse for two nights. We have directors, actors, playwrights and designers in out group. We were all assigned roles out of our specialty. For example a playwright was director, I was an actor and so on. It was indirectly about 9/11 which triggered a lot of feelings from those who were in NYC when it happened. Most of the people stuck their noses into the script and read. I scooped and did well. I was able to make eye contact with the others.

A lot of good discussion and a lot of fun. Roy is a great cold reader.

Finished off the beer when I got home tonight. Got to get some more tomorrow.

Damn: I’m calling the hotel room home. Must have been here too long.

Good night. It’s 11:45 PM