Thursday, June 7th – Day Four – Part Two

One final (maybe) thought on “Only Children”:

Of the three plays I’ve seen (including the one I saw Thursday but have not shared yet), Only Children was by far the most fully realized. Blocking, singing, relationships, etc were all pretty well done. To have accomplished all of this in three weeks is truly a Herculean accomplishment.

Tidbit: Discussion has the same root word as percussion – not a soft and gentle word. Dialog is.

Tidbit: Process and product are tied together. If you are not satisfied with the product, look at the process to see what isn’t working right.

So far I’ve seen three plays and talked to the playwright of a fourth (out of five). In every case (with the possible exception of The Maestro’s Garden where the playwright had to leave for a family emergency) the playwright has made a conscious decision to turn direction of the play over to the director rather than do it themselves. One playwright told me that while he was fumbling around trying to direct he couldn’t see the big picture: How the play was working. He wanted to be in his role of playwright so he could watch the play, see where the problems were and work on rewrites to solve them.

After all my words last night about directing styles, the director of today’s play “This Bloody Mess” said that she got the actors up the first day to look at some things in the play that may have needed work. Two actors complained about that: having to put the work up for people to see (even if it was just the people from that play) without doing all the table work they were used to which helps them find the character.

This Bloody Mess is an interesting type of play: 5 Acts, probably 50 scenes in 2 1/4 hours. That makes the average scene just a couple of minutes long. Added to that was jumping back and forth in time. All in all the play suffered from the short scenes. We know we lose the audience when there is a scene change and it takes several minutes to get them back into the play when the next scene starts. What happens when the next scene is not long enough to get them back?

My take on this play is that it would make a good screen play.

The story is about a young woman who leaves her home and child to go to an unnamed country to do good work. She goes for a short period of time but stays several years. We watch her but also the effect on her family back home. Like most plays, this one would be considerably better if it were shortened (except for my plays of course).

One closing comment: The ending of the play almost made me cry and I’m not one who cries easily.

Our evening session was made up of the same group we worked with Wednesday night. The goal is to have everyone in our small group do something other than what they normally do. In our case, we were directed by a playwright, Roy Thinnes was the playwright and I was an actor and so on. Our task was to put the play up on it’s feet then answer two questions about the play: What is the “action” of the play and what is the play about. First no one knew what was meant by “action” and we never did figure out what the play was about. Well we couldn’t agree on what the play was about. Each of us had a different idea. Our playwright playing director was not in charge of what happened so we just sat at the table for two nights talking (arguing) about the play. For people who want to try to figure it out, the play is “Woman at at Threshold, Beckoning” by John Guare.

One final comment before I get on with today:

Play writing is a solo sport. Directing is a team sport. Since I’m not a “real” playwright, I can’t talk about playwrights in general. But a successful director needs to be a leader. Don’t tell LCT I said this but he needs to be a benevolent dictator. Someone has to be in charge. It had better be the director if you are to get anything done.

The personalities of the few playwrights I’ve met here do not go to being the leader. If an aspiring director does not have strong leadership qualities, he is not going to be successful. If a playwright does not have strong leadership qualities, he is not going to be a successful director either. I’ll keep watching but that is my first thought on having playwrights direct.

Time to get to work.

Thursday 2 – June 7th – Day Four

Woke up this morning at 6 am with two things on my mind: The play we saw yesterday and the discussion I had with Mark about directing styles.

First, the play from yesterday. Roy Thinnes called it pornographic even though he really liked it. The young, opinionated director in our group hated it (not surprising – she hates anything she didn’t do) plus two others were greatly offended by it. One young woman said she was surprised at how puritanical she was. Looking back on it, was I offended? Mildly. I was taken in by the drama of the play and the high quality of the music. Do I think it was pornographic? No. But if they cast it with young kids (12 to 13 years old) rather that the 20+ year old actors they used, it would be. It would have been if there was any nudity, but there wasn’t. I do think they were far too graphic with the sex scenes but they didn’t rise to pornography.

What was the play about? The sexual pressures on 12 year old kids from advertising, from TV and movies, from their parents as they grow up. We saw a 12 year old girl become a prostitute. A 12 year old boy think he was gay and kill himself, a 12 year old boy rape a girl on a date and kill himself – all graphically represented on stage.

BUT the important thing was that this play moved us. No one was neutral about it. We are still talking about it today.

I may have been offended but I will look at the world differently now. Isn’t that what great theater is all about?

One more thought: As I said last night, the purpose of these plays is not to present new plays but to test a hypothesis: Will having the playwright direct the play make it possible to present a better product (play) in a short period of time?

If they had selected some Neil Simon type of play, the playwrights as directors wouldn’t have to face the hard issues of working with actors in these hard scenes.

Issue number 2: My discussion with Mark yesterday confirms what I thought about my directing style when I got here: I need to work with some other off island instructors to see how they work.
Whatever directing skills I possess were learned from other directors (mostly local), reading books and the school of hard knocks. I need to find a director to work with or just observe it is done in the professional theater.

As I have said before, I spend very little time at the table going over the script while most directors spend a lot of up front time at the table. I could prepare the entire play before the first rehearsal – I have a good idea what I want out of each scene and how I plan to achieve it – but I don’t prepare to the extent that I could go page by page through the script and spend 30 to 40 hours doing it. The advantage that I see to my current method is that I can make adjustments as I see them without throwing away a lot of work.

Here’s an interesting tidbit:

The copper and silver bracelet I wear is shiny when I wear it at home. When I got to NYC it started to tarnish until it looked like it was a million years old. In the past three days it has become shiny again. Wonder why????

Another interesting tidbit: The subways are a study in acoustics. When you first hear the train coming all you hear are the very lowest frequency sounds. Since they spread out so rapidly, you have no idea which direction the train is coming from. As it get closer there are more and more higher frequency components which let you determine which direction it is coming from.

It’s 11:30 and I’m tired.

Have to finish this tomorrow.

Wednesday 2 – June 6th – Day three

Lots of energy today – I must have adjusted to the schedule.

Plus I went back to Gatorade – I think the sugar helps keep my energy up.

Up at 7:00 out of the room by 8. The weather is nice in the upper 50’s in the morning. New Yorkers are complaining that it is cold. Supposed to hit the 90’s by the weekend.

I walked to Lincoln Center today – it takes about 20 minutes – at a good pace – without running into a lot of people – the sidewalks are full of people in the morning. Stopped at a drugstore to get some toiletries and a bottle of Gatorade.

I got there at 9 am – a full hour before the start and there were lots of others there also.

Had a real good chat with a director from California and I was asking him if his casts spent a week or more at the table before they get on their feet. He said it varies but between 1/4 and ½ of his rehearsal time is spent at the table. I told him I get them up after six hours. I asked him what he does with the 30 to 50 hours. He does the same stuff that I do but I do it during the rehearsal. He goes through the script page by page asking the actors “where are you coming from?, How do you feel about entering? What do you want in this scene?” I do the same but I do it one scene at a time.

We had our second (of three) sessions on ‘Collaboration” today. What a waste of time. We spent the first hour and a quarter reviewing what we did yesterday. Here are a couple of valuable comments I heard during the session today:

In every production someone is in charge and someone is the leader but they may not be the same person.

We talked about the first day of rehearsals and what people covered. The best comment related to establishing “values” for the production. These are set by and agreed to by all in the production. An example is “One of our rehearsal values is being on time.”

A side note: Many of the directors here are confident to the point of arrogance. My guess is that their ability is inversely proportional to their arrogance.

Building a consensus is a subset of Collaboration. Here is what one group said about consensus:

Consensus is dangerous in art because you tend to lose the edges and the edges are what makes art.

One of the good things that comes out of the morning sessions is the small group work. The larger group is broken up into small groups of 3, 4or 5. He rearranges the groups so we get to spend time with and get to know many other people here. Today I spent time with a playwright from the University of Connecticut and a Director from Washington D.C. Really nice people. The playwright has a play he wrote that is running now and he leaves this weekend to see the final week of it. He had a lot of questions about how we, as directors, interpret the work of the playwright. His problem was that the Director had made interpretations of his play that weren’t consistent with the playwrights. Both of us agreed that it is our responsibility to present the playwrights vision of the play as long as the playwright was reasonably available. We could have talked for hours more.

The afternoon program was another of the five plays they have been rehearsing. Yesterday was The Maestro’s Garden. Today was a full fledged musical called Only Children. Roy Thinnes summed it up tonight at our session with him: It would never make Broadway – it is too close to pornography. The musical is about the sexual exploitation of 12 year old children. Pretty graphic in word, deed and song. The 12 year olds were played by young actors in their 20’s. Even the young people in the audience felt “surprisingly Puritan” over it. It was offensive but it did make us think which means that it was good. Remember the comment from the first night that “If everyone in your audience thinks George Bush is great and you present a show that says George Bush is great, what have you accomplished? One of the adult actors said he would not have done the play if he had read it first but “you don’t say ‘no’ when Lincoln enter calls.”

Lincoln Center told us they had picked plays with an edge. I think most people lost sight of the purpose of these plays: To see how the production process works if the playwright is directing the plays assisted by an experienced director. This play went right to the center of my main issue: How does a playwright direct the difficult parts of plays if he has no experience in directing? Interestingly, in this case the playwrights (two – one for music and one for words) did not try to direct. Somehow the Lincoln Center message got translated into “The playwright is in charge of the room.” Many of the sexual scenes would be terribly hard for ANY actor to do and it would take a real caring hand on the part of the director to get the actor to where he/she needed to be.

Definitely, not a play for Orcas – or Doug for that matter but it DID make me think.

We had another three hours with Roy Thinnes tonight in our small group. They gave us a play by John Guare to rehearse for two nights. We have directors, actors, playwrights and designers in out group. We were all assigned roles out of our specialty. For example a playwright was director, I was an actor and so on. It was indirectly about 9/11 which triggered a lot of feelings from those who were in NYC when it happened. Most of the people stuck their noses into the script and read. I scooped and did well. I was able to make eye contact with the others.

A lot of good discussion and a lot of fun. Roy is a great cold reader.

Finished off the beer when I got home tonight. Got to get some more tomorrow.

Damn: I’m calling the hotel room home. Must have been here too long.

Good night. It’s 11:45 PM

Tuesday 2 – June 5th – Day Two

Wake up early ( 6 am) and work on my play and answer e-mail. It never stops but I actually like hearing from you.

Get to Lincoln Center at 9 am – an hour early and a third of the group is already there.

They told us that this was not a training program but we sit through three hours of Collaboration building – you know “Collaboration is made up of “co” which means together and “labor” which means working – working together!!! Get it? Three hours of this today and three more Wednesday and three more Thursday.

Anyway, I get to meet several other attendees including a guy who has been commissioned by Seattle’s Theater Off Jackson to write a hip-hop opera. He said that there was a lot more money in opera than musical theater. Investors put money in musical theater and big donors put money into opera.

For those who I’ve talked to before I left, I told you that LCT was rehearsing five plays for three weeks before we got here. Actually four plays and a musical. None of the five has ever been produced. These plays were cast by the Director and playwright from lists of actors provided by LCT.

The big deal is that the plays are being directed by the playwright who wrote them with a professional set designer and Stage manager and director in case there are any questions.

Today’s play was The Maestro’s Garden. It was REALLY good. Subject matter not suitable for Orcas plus it needs one African American. Two things knocked my socks off. One was the quality of the acting – really there – 99% off book. The other thing was the actors. Six in the cast an one only had a dozen lines but the other five were really top drawer. Roy Thinnes and Richard Masur were two of them. Both of whom I’ve seen a lot on TV and the movies.

As I sat there, I wondered if our actors on Orcas could do as well. The answer I came up with was pretty much. Our people would be 90% as good. But this was in three weeks, we would take eight weeks. But then I got to think: These actors rehearsed three weeks at five hours a day six days a week for a total of 90 hours. For Enchanted April we had 35 rehearsals before opening or 32 before tech. At three hours each that makes 96 hours total rehearsal – about the same time as the professionals – plus we would have had the blocking down too.

Not too bad for Orcas.

The last session for the day ( 7 to 10 pm) was a small group program. We had seven in our group – 3 directors, 2 playwrights and 1 set designer plus Roy Thinnes. We were given an outline of what to talk about but that quickly went out the window. Everyone talked about problems and successes they have had – directors, playwrights and the set designer. Roy threw his thoughts in and was a real participant but didn’t try to control the flow of the discussion.

I was really put off by one young director who challenged and argued everything that Thinnes said. He is due more than a little respect for what he has accomplished. After a while every one pretty much tried to ignore her. For example, we were talking about playwrights (I knew very few of the names) and if Thinnes said he liked one she said he was no good. That kind of thing.

I didn’t have a lot to offer because all the discussion was about professional theater and I didn’t have much to add.

One time a playwright was talking about attending rehearsals but not wanting to interrupt. She used as an example a line that was supposed to be a joke. She wanted to say something but she thought that maybe the director was aware of it but wasn’t ready. I echoed that statement, saying that the director needed to know each actor and push them at a pace that worked for them. Thinnes said Bullshit. Rehearsal time is too precious and it takes more time not to tell the actor the line is a joke than to do it later when it is harder for the actor to change the delivery of the line.

Thinnes told us of the best notes he ever got from a director were from Garland Wright (I have no idea who he is/was). Wright gave notes that always started with “Wouldn’t it be nice if . . . .”

We were told to finish up any time after 9:30 and be out of the building by ten. They finally came and kicked us out at 10:15.

A good day but I am really tired – even more so than AIRE.

Monday – June 4th – Day one

Rain!!! The tail end of a hurricane. NYC got 2 1/4 inches of rain between 7 am and 1 pm. Guess when I was out running around? 8 am to 2 pm.

Got my laundry without a problem but they didn’t get the stains out of my shirts. Two less shirts to wear. I’m tough on shirts.

The program started at 2:30. Big security at LCT.

Here are my notes – in the order I took them:

Afternoon session – 2:30 to 5 pm

This is a big deal for LCT – the end of their season.

LCT sees themselves as the testing and proving ground for the future of American Theater.

We were welcomed but the President of the LCT Board and the Director. There were several LCT Board members present.

1. The Lab is for attendees
2. It’s an idea place not a career place (although many of the LCT directors have come through this program and been noticed here.
3. Most are in their 20’s and early 30’s without a lot of experience.
4. Not a teaching environment (I’m not certain that is totally accurate)
5. Most directors do their best work in the first third of their careers.
6. The Lab works best when it is intense – thus the long tiring days.
7. All great theater is made by groups of peers – from Shakespeare to Moliere to Steffan Wolf.
8. Theater training has moved away from the apprentice/mentor model to the colleges and universities. Too many don’t have much real life hands on experience – just the false reality of the college environment.
9. Today we have playwrights learning how to be playwrights, directors learning how to be directors, designers learning how to be designers. No one is learning all the pieces anymore.
10. This lab is a change in direction for LCT. For the first week there will be 150 of us. (70 Directors – 14 from other countries and the rest from the US – 15 playwrights – 15 Designers – 35 professional actors – 15 others – primarily those working on the five plays that have been in rehearsal for the past three weeks. Next Sunday everyone but the Directors go home.
11. We are to try to answer two questions:
A. Have we reached the end of the play development cycle in the American Theater as we know it today?
B. What is the relationship between young (ie, new) playwrights and actors and directors and designers?
12. The top of the food chain works well for those who started in the theater in the ‘70’s or ’80’s: Stoppard, Wasserstein, etc. Today there is no room for playwrights under 45 +/-.
13. The costs of presenting a play have put so many constraints on the play development process that there is no room for the old way: A group of peers get together and do a play that they write, develop and present.
14. Today, no young writer has access to that old model – even the repertory theater model is being replaced by the graduate school experience.
15. Today the new actors and new directors do not have access to each other. The actors are working in theaters that the new director can not access.

A few random comments:
1. Do any of the young people today have the time to work with their peers – they have to spend all their time trying to earn enough to stay alive.
2. What an actor can do in a reading has no relationship to what that actor can do in a rehearsal. (In response to a question about all the readings of new plays that go on now around the country.)
3. Who controls access and selection to the designers? In many theaters the director is given the designers and not allowed to chose his/her own. Does this work?
4. “Why are actors so marginalized in today’s atmosphere?”
5. Some writers are writing plays that can not be acted by actors as they are trained in the traditional way. (???)
6. Why is there such a big divide between actors and playwrights? (Read: Why do directors keep them apart.)

The five plays we will see have been directed by the playwrights with a director available as an adviser to the playwright. They have been using the standard rehearsal schedule: 5 hours a day, six days a week for three weeks. In theory, these plays are one week from tech (although none will go any further after this Lab).

Monday night 7 to 10 PM

We had two panels tonight. This kind of belies the no teaching they talked about.

In the last 20 years we have seen American theater move from the “theaters running the backers” to the “backers running the theater” There are many examples of this.

In the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, the theaters were new and had boards that were the contemporaries of the actors/directors/writers that were part of the company. Now the actors/directors/writers have moved on but the boards haven’t. The need for money from he boards needs older people who can come up with the big bucks. This is a major problem because the people who are paying for it want to see shows that appeal to them but the new talented playwrights are writing for their age group.

Today, Broadway is using focus groups to determine what content a play should have. There are even rumbles of advertiser tie ins (make sure we see a bottle of Michelob in this play.)

After some period of time ALL institutions become self serving.

80% of the directors work is defensive – trying to keep other people happy so he can keep his show together.

There was a lot of criticism of the unions and how difficult it is to mount a small inexpensive play.

It is not the number of hours of rehearsal that counts but the number of days. Actors need time to find their characters and have it settle in.

In many cases the total time between first rehearsal and opening night is the same but now half or more than half the time is spent in previews so the theater can sell more tickets. Most seemed to feel that previews were counterproductive because the preview audiences are not the same as the final audience.

Even though this Lab is about more involvement by playwrights in the process, the panelists (actors, designers and directors) seemed to think that it is a mistake. The reasons:
The playwrights try to get everything they need/want from the actor the first day. (I agree with that.)
Each actor is different and needs a different approach from the director – a skill that most playwrights don’t have. ( I agree here too.)
It takes understanding and skill to help an actor move outside his/her comfort zone – something very few playwrights have any experience in. (I agree here most of all.)

“No matter how good you are and how hard you work, someone in the audience will fall asleep”

“If you have an audience of people who love George Bush and you do a play that says George Bush in a good guy, you haven’t accomplished anything.”

Got home after 11 pm . Rain stopped.