Really Starting to Cook
Posted by Martin McClendon on 7/24/2009
Martin McClendon, who plays Martin in Ensemble member Eric Simonson’s First Look play, Honest, is a professor of Theatre at College Carthage where Honest was first commissioned.
The role of Martin was written for him.
Honest was performed in an early student production up there with an all student cast, and Martin’s students were all invited to audition for this First Look Production.
Martin is blogging regularly to his students about his experiences here at Steppenwolf, and we thought we’d share them with you (you can find his previous entry here).
Blog #5 (July 17)
We had another run-through today. Tomorrow is Designer Run, where the design team comes in to watch, as well as some other staff. They are there to see how we are interacting with the set, and to get a feel for the show to inform other design choices (costume, lights, sound). But for us it’s kind of like a first audience, and a very experienced one at that!
Last entry I talked about breaking down the script into little beats and then zooming the lens back out and telling the story in broader strokes. Today in notes Eric said that now it’s about finding the right balance and pitch between differing objectives and tactics. It occurred to me that we are like classical music composers. The play isn’t so much made up of separate moments knitted together as it is themes that sometimes play very loudly in the foreground, but at other times provide background music.
As I rehearse my scenes, I am starting to think of layering in different objectives as if they were new instruments: they don’t replace my previous objective, they add to it. Some fade up, others fade down. Naturally, the other actors have their own orchestras going, and we all have to harmonize for the thing to work. This, it strikes me, is something more like how our minds work in everyday life. You could be thinking about having some delicious cheesecake all day; it’s a constant goal. But driving your car or talking to your boss may take precedence at any given moment. That doesn’t mean you don’t still want some cheesecake…
Do not write blog while hungry.
Blog #6 (July 19)
Yesterday was Designer Run. I was a little nervous at the start to have an audience of staff and designers watching us, but the run went well and the show is really starting to cook now. I think the cast feels ready to have an audience come in and react to the story. Sunday is a 10 out of 12 tech day. Looking forward to it. We visited the set last week and it looks great. The space is intimate, only 100 seats arranged on either side of the stage. It will be interesting to have people that close to us while we work…
Blog #7 (July 21)
Yesterday was our 10 out of 12 tech day. This means we can be called for 10 of the 12 hours of the day (if we are provided with sufficient time off the next day). This was our first rehearsal on the actual set, in addition to being a tech rehearsal. And we had costumes! So a lot of new stuff came at us at once.
I talked with JR Lederle, the light designer. He has to design a light plot that will work for all three First Look shows, and program each show separately into the light board. I believe he said he has about 50 circuits to work with. I told him we only have 78 on our mainstage at Carthage. He said that’s the best way to learn how to design lights. He himself learned in a theatre with a 40-foot proscenium and only 60 circuits. “If you can light a space like that, you can light anything.” For Honest, he is using unique colors in the Marshfield scene: a rose-colored top light and a very green fill light. This gives an amber look to the set and makes it really seem like a dingy old kitchen lit by incandescent light. The green fill light gives us weird shadow colors, too.
Jonathan Templeton, the production stage manager, showed me his prompt book. It was his very neat performance copy, containing only cues for lights, sound, actors, etc. (as opposed to his rehearsal copy, marked up with blocking notes and line changes). Jonathan prefers to write cues on the same page as the text so his eyes don’t have to travel across the page. He didn’t color-code his cues (to differentiate lights, sound, etc), but he does that with larger shows. The booth is just a raised area behind the audience risers, and there is no wall or window separating them, so Jonathan will be calling cues very quietly. “That’s one of the special skills on my resume.” The actor’s green room is also not blocked off by solid walls, so we have to be extremely quiet backstage during the show.
The costume and scenic crews are great. Costumes look good, and the set is a very clean uncluttered design. Scene changes only involve moving furniture around. Sound designer Joe Fosco has composed all original music for the show. It is eerie and unsettling, underscoring the shifting nature of truth in the play.
Due to the small size of the space, the audience will be very visible not only to us, but to each other as they look across the stage in a “stadium” seating arrangement. This will add a new dimension to our work. The First Look 101 folks came in at 7pm and watched us work for an hour. This was useful to me because it showed exactly where the audience will be sitting and how visible they will be.
Tech is always a weird time for actors, who have to perform while people scurry around and discuss changes in the set or lights. The tendency is to get a bit silly as the night wears on, but the attitude has to remain professional so the work can get finished. As actors, tech frequently causes us to lose a little ground on our work due to the distractions. It is easy to get sidetracked by the constant stopping and starting, etc.
We got there at 11am and got into costume. We went all the way through the show, practicing scene shifts multiple times. This took about five hours. Then after dinner break, we just ran the transitions to give the crew a chance to practice the shifts. Actors were done at 9pm. Eric and the crew stayed longer to discuss the evening’s events.
Tomorrow scene work, Wednesday a run-through followed by opening night!
Time for sleep…