Looking good.

Again, mad props to the design team and stage management and Production Manager Juliet Chia. Respect.

i can’t sleep.

I cannot reiterate what an amazing job all the designers have done, and also and especially Juliet Chia my production manager, in getting the space ready in a few days. These photos are from the first day of actors in the theater.  Thrilling and scary.  Thrilling because things are becoming very real very quickly.  Scary because, well in many ways this is the beginning of the process of the play leaving me — which is great and wonderful and sad and amazing. We go into two days of heavy tech starting tomorrow.

this is what happens when you turn the lights on…

Sorry the posts have been sporadic.  The work has been intense in rehearsals.  On Monday we began load-in and the designers and crew have been doing amazing things in the theater, with the amazing organizational talents of Juliet Chia, our Production Manager. Here she is with Sound Designer Rich Kim.

And here with Jonathan, the associate set designer who has been a rockstar as well.

I went through paper tech with Stacey, Nicole, Rich and Jeanette this afternoon which was also very helpful in preparing for our 12 hour days in the theater on Friday and Saturday.

Here is the WALL in its full glory.  so clean and white! oooooh….

And the view of the stage from off stage right:

If you didn’t know, HERE has been going through MAJOR construction and renovations the last several months, and oph3lia will be the first show in the mainstage space since re-opening.  The whole space has really transformed — it’s amazing!

The actors move into the theater tomorrow!!!!!!  It’s an exciting and scary time when all the ideas come into being — the meeting of reality and ideals, which if often a frustrating and revelatory process.  Our last rehearsal in the bank vault tonight, we worked heavily with putting music together. We set up a little sound tech table for Rich and Andy.  I love these guys.

We’re at a point where the only real way for us to get a sense of the play and what needs work is just running.  Last Wednesday was actually more of a technical rehearsal to nail down transitions.  Dawn’s camera was free-roaming handled by actors and caught some great rehearsal poses.

This reminds me, Mark could NOT STOP LAUGHING at rehearsal yesterday.  It was pretty funny.  I guess it is hard not to laugh when you have to open your eyes to this unbearably cute person:

And one more:

I’ve lost count now, it was inevitable.

You can tell how tight a group of people are by how comfortable they are in sharing their bodily functions.  Not that it is always pleasant or even desirable for people to be farting and etc. during rehearsals, but the fact that these things occur, with regularity, and are met with mild encouragement, I think, is a testament to this group’s trust in each other.

Lately, the bagel has been haunting me.  Specifically Connie’s bagel.  It appeared one day in a schoolgirls’ rehearsal, and it just keep coming back and coming back.  I even forbade bagels in rehearsal, but that only made things worse.  Today I even found an actual bagel in my bag — someone had planted it there.

Here is that bagel alongside Connie’s bagel, with her permission.

Sorry for the gap. I moved into a new apartment and then left town for the first weekend of May. Actually I was in rural Oregon, where the ground shook with electricity.

That was the view outside our rehearsal space. (more about it here)

It was a beautiful place — but very strange to leave oph3lia for a few days. Working on this play is like working on three different plays — it’s kind of crazy that way. We’re at a difficult point now where everything must converge.

From a recent rehearsal, in the school girls’ section, the internal plot points (school girls’ frustration and desire to escape/Mr. Pratt drilling Cissy/Ms. Warren & Principal Geary’s love affair) swirl out into a physical sequence.

Jy gets some air there.

Stacey the stage manager has been so remarkably cool throughout. Here she is, writing down blocking!!!

At least, I think it’s blocking! Honestly I don’t know how she is able to describe what the actors are doing as stage directions. Then again, only she can read her handwriting so it may be some kind of secret advanced code.

I like to use a lot of different kinds of warm-ups at the beginning of rehearsals, mostly physical.  I tend to do a lot of yoga-influenced stuff because I think it helps the actors renew their attention to their bodies, and also make them aware of their breath.  It’s almost a cliche, but it still amazes me to think about breath: how it is a vital, necessary function of the human body, and yet it can be controlled by the human will/mind.  Unlike many other physiological mechanisms that operate without our conscious effort (heartbeat, blood flow, cell regeneration, digestive processes) we can exert control (to a certain, even great extent) over our breath.  Because of this, many practices (yogic, performance techniques, and otherwise) look to the breath as a key to the connection between body and mind (spirit and matter, rational and emotional).  I have always been intrigued at dance performances to what extent breath is visible.  In Suzuki, breath is “the actors’ secret.”  And there is something so immediate about hearing people breathe — you can sense someone’s emotional state in their breath.

Last Tuesday was a singing day, so I wanted to give the actors a breathing exercise.  I had them all lie down with their heads on each others’ bellies.

Then, starting with Mark who was at the bottom of this head-to-belly pile, they pass a deep breath on to each other, one by one.  It’s a pretty elementary exercise, but a good way to build awareness of your breath in your belly when you got someone’s 10 pound noggin on it.

After breaths, they passed laughs and cries down.  It was difficult to discern which laughs were part of the exercise and which were genuine after a while.

Good times.

You know who is AWESOME? Joan Jubett, that’s who. Do you know her? She is this amazing actress who went to Columbia for MFA in acting, I think the same year as Connie. Everyone who knows her and her work raves about how incredible she is.  I knew her peripherally for years, and then got to know her better over the last year or so.

Anyway when I sent out casting notices for oph3lia a few months back, I was shocked when she expressed interest in participating.  She ended up having an immovable schedule conflict during the run of the show, so instead she’s come on board as “Assistant Director.”  I put that in quotes because, really, I’ve never had an assistant director before, and probably wouldn’t have thought of trying to get one, or asking anyone I knew and respect to fill that position.  But I can’t tell you how great it’s been to have her in the room!  Someone clear-headed, intelligent, passionate, and who innately understands how to make theater.

On Sunday I asked Joan to review the schoolgirl dance on DVD so she could teach it to everyone.  I knew that the old cast would kind of remember it but I thought it would help to have someone jog their memory.

Well this was one of the best ideas ever, because, it turns out, Joan is like Dance Captain Supreme, Queen of Choreography.  “I’m not a dancer” she kept saying, but then she’d plow through all the movement sequences.  She was able to teach the whole dance to the girls in one day.

Here she is in the green shirt in front.

And that is the butt shot.

Here they are doing “the robot.”  Joan had very specific philosophies about this dance.  Ask her about it some time.  Laura pulled out the C-3PO.  Fricking hysterical.

I don’t know what they took but I swear to god the school girls were high tonight. It was actually a great evening, and the ensemble is beginning to really gel and blossom in a way that (I am embarrassed to admit) sometimes makes me tear up. Anyway, during a kind of physical improvisation session today, the girls are started choking, gagging, retching, dying and reviving, in a really like exaggerated grotesque “28 Days Later” kind of way, as Joan put it. The photos of that didn’t really turn out, so I settle on these:

Connie, nonplussed, is having a moment with the audience.

Schoolgirls wander through the hallway.

How close can you get?

aw.