The Eye of the Storm
Posted by Eric Simonson on 9/17/2009
(Eric is the playwright and director of Fake)
Saturday, 2pm: Technical rehearsals started today for Fake. We joke and call it the fake tech rehearsal, but it’s very real, and hopefully all our expectations will be met. This is the first time the crew and cast get to see all the production elements together.
The initial hours of tech give me an indication of how the next three or four days will go. So far, so good. We’re about two hours in and moving along. The costumes look tremendous: we’re in the 1914 part of the play. Karin Kopishcke did a wonderful job supplementing what the actors have already developed with their characters. The mood of the play is coming together very nicely: very “Agatha Christie mystery.” Todd Rosenthal has created a very evocative and open design, and it fits nicely in the Steppenwolf space. Technical director Russell Poole oversaw the building of the set, and it all looks exactly like the model. I couldn’t have asked for better. Prop Master Jenny DiLuciano and her crew are bringing in a great assortment of archeological artifacts that add to what Todd has created. There’s a lot of detail here that reinforces collective design. Things are definitely coming together, but I’m already itching to get back to the play and the actors.
Saturday, 8:30pm: We’re making steady progress. At this moment, we’re working a complicated transition, going into a scene that reveals a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes. Lights, sound and actor’s movement all need to come together with precision. We make subtle changes along the way, and it’s time consuming. Still, we’re either ahead of or right on schedule. My hope is that, by the end of the evening, we’ll be well into Act II, maybe 3/4ths of the way through the play. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a run of the show by tomorrow night. This would put us in a very good place. The sound of the show is coming into focus as well, with lots of evocative music and sound from Barry Funderberg. Barry did the sound design for my show Carter’s Way. He fooled a lot of people into believing our actors were actually playing instruments in a jazz combo (and he won a Jeff Award for his efforts). Barry and I have worked on lots of shows over the past decade.
Saturday, 11:30pm: End of first day of tech rehearsal. We’ve done alright. We’re into Scene Six (of eight), which puts us about at the 3/4ths mark I’d hoped for. We had a glitch with sound a little earlier (computer error), but picked up steam toward the end of the evening. I’m getting a lot of different looks from my lighting designer Joe Appelt. He’s written some cues ahead of time; others he creates as we go, and he’ll continue to finesse them as we move into the preview process. He’s been able to give me some very interesting looks in two outdoor scenes (Four and Five). There’s a quasi-cloudy backdrop upstage which he uses to create a sense of romance in one scene, and religious drama in the other.
Toward the end of every 10 out of 12 rehearsals, cast and crew get a little punchy and/or tired. That’s about where we are now. Tomorrow we’ll attack the rest of the play.
Sunday, 1pm: We’re an hour into our second day of tech, currently going over what is probably the most complicated transition in the show: going from the 1953 British Museum to Conan Doyle’s 1914 drawing room. Everyone’s involved in this one, and there’s a quick-change (costumes: an actor has literally 30 seconds to change from one costume and character to another). I may be obsessing about what we get done and how fast we’re going, but that’s what I do in tech. I put a lot of stake in getting back to acting rehearsals as soon as possible. I’ve also been looking over the script during this time and making changes in the text, which I’d like to get to the actors as soon as possible. Wednesday is our first public performance.
Sunday, 3:30pm: Just finished teching the show all the way through. The staff and I decided we’ll now do what they call a cue to cue: going over all the cues we’ve done so far to make sure they’re what we want exactly. David New, Steppenwolf’s Associate Artistic Director, stopped by to check progress, and he told me that by this time in the tech process, The Tempest had not yet finished teching the first 10 minutes of their show. That sounds rough until you take into account that it was an extraordinary 10 minutes of theatre: well worth the time, if you ask me. But as this is a new play, and that’s where most of my energies go, I’m glad to be teching something not quite so complex.
We could opt for a run of the show tonight instead of a cue to cue, but I’ve got another full day of rehearsal on Tuesday. A full-out run might be pretty rough on the actors. Better to wait now and give them a rest.
Time to get some sleep.