Steppenwolf Theatre Company Blog – Chicago Theater, World-Class Ensemble

Tomorrow: the staff run-through. (I’m writing this entry on Wednesday evening, 19 April) The staff run-through is the moment when the rehearsal process goes public. During the first three weeks or so of the rehearsal, the only people in the room are the cast, the director and his or her assistant, and stage management. On the Thursday before tech – the move from the rehearsal room and into the theater – the staff and designers attend a run-through of the show. It’s always a precarious-feeling moment for the cast – very exposing. A show is, variously, well-on-its-way to very much in-process. And as an actor in the show, it’s never entirely clear where on that continuum your show sits. The staff run-through becomes a kind of barometer of that progress.

The purpose of the staff run-through is to give, first, the designers, a chance to see the show in space and time. As to space: the set designer is watching the actors move through the space – observing transitions, calculating the traffic of the stage against the space s/he has created. The costume crew is plotting the costume changes (how much time do we have for each change; where are the actors during each change?). The lighting and sound designers and their technicians are watching both the geography of the stage movement and its timing. And the properties crew (part of the set design team), is tracking the use of furniture, hand props and consumables – food, drink, and whatever props (newspapers, envelopes, items that get broken) will need replacement or maintenance. None of this information should be coming as a terrible surprise to the designers or production crew – they have been receiving daily rehearsal reports from stage management that tracks all of these concerns – but it is the staff run-through that makes those notes visible and vivid.

For the theater’s non-production staff – artistic, marketing, and development – the staff run-through provides the feeling-tone of the play (which they have, thus far, received as a written text and in a single previous read-through of the play). They see the style of the play, the pitch of the performances, the abstraction of a play text and a roster of actors becomes a living, feeling reality. The performance of the play that they receive in this early run-through provides the information they need to talk about the show to their various constituencies – box office, press, patrons. The artistic staff, and whatever ensemble members are in town, watch the run-through and the following week and a half of previews in order to respond to the director – giving him/her notes in an effort to clarify and refine the production.

After the staff run-through, the actors leave the room (much relieved to have gotten through it) and the director sits down with the designers and the production staff to discuss what they learned and prepare themselves for tech. This meeting is orchestrated by our production manager (Al Franklin) who goes through questions from each department (sets, lights, costumes, sound) to understand their issues and concerns. The director answers their questions, clarifying intent, resolving questions. Again, these resolutions are abstract – it is in tech, when the show moves to the actual theater space, when the production is given body.

The passage from the rehearsal room to tech, through previews and on to opening night is an amazing transformation that involves scores of people, tremendous concentration, and hours of time. It’s ridiculously intensive in terms of the use of human resources. And it’s what makes the theater such a blast and so valuable a human endeavor. There’s just no way that the work of creating a production can be accomplished in the abstract, in virtual space or time. A lot of people have to spend hours together in a closed room, a darkened theater, working over and over the execution of tasks that will produce… magic! Be it the magic of human emotion, the magic of a 20-second costume change, the magic of a scene change that transforms one environment into another, the magic of rain on stage, the lighting that creates the passage of time, the magic of an emotional shift orchestrated through sound.

The most accurate metaphor is birth – a lot of labor and then… (if we’re lucky) a miracle: a beautiful being with a life of its own. The staff run-through begins that labor process – we go public with the pregnancy we have been nurturing in the privacy of our rehearsal room home. To give our play to the world.

This entry was posted by Martha Lavey on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Love-Lies-Bleeding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.