Half-Way Point
Posted by Michelle Medvin on 4/03/2009Last weekend we had a bit of a reality check up here in our little Art community — one of the crew members asked me when the half-way point of our long run was. Positive we were already beyond it, I started counting up the weeks. I was wrong — the end of this week will mark our midway point. That’s hard for me to absorb, given how much has already happened during the run of Art. We are currently rehearsing Ian Barford, or “Marc the Third” as I’m affectionately referring to him. Technically, since an understudy has also performed that role once, Ian will actually be the fourth actor to take the stage as Marc in this production (and the third to perform it consistently). We are also on our third Yvan (if, again, we include an understudy who has performed) and our second Serge. That’s a lot for the half-way point.
However…even though all the extra rehearsals involved in preparing understudies to go on and replacement actors to take over have been daunting at times, all these changes have also been something of a gift. When I sent out our performance report on our opening day, I joked “Now we just have to keep it fresh until June!” And that task is anything but “just” — keeping the energy up in a show performed eight times a week for 18 weeks, always trying to keep the moments, the humor, and the emotion seemingly genuine, is definitely the most difficult part of a long run. The actors grow and find new depth to their characters, and the production shifts — but it can’t shift too much. Any changes must be within the scope of the director’s artistic vision. And the longer the run, the more delicate a balance that is — walking the line between keeping it fresh while also maintaining what was originally set forth. Having cast changes has given us a guaranteed freshness. As Artistic Director Martha Lavey pointed out in her blog post a few weeks ago, different actors automatically bring different nuances to the same roles, even when they’re all directed by the same person. And the nuances that they bring gives their fellow actors new things to work with. So with understudies going on and new actors taking over, the revolving cast of actors hasn’t had to work too hard to keep things fresh — we’ve kept things interesting for them.
I’ve been looking at next week as a sort of end point — the cast changes will be complete (I think!) for the remainder of the run. What I realized last weekend, though, is that it’s not an end point after all — the task of keeping the show fresh for 9 weeks (which is, for Steppenwolf, still an average-length full run) remains our challenge.