You’d think that, by the time I reached 72 years old, my life would be predictable and in order. Not so. Just when I think everything is going well the whole picture explodes throwing burning pieces all over the place. Last week was one of those times when my life exploded. Over the last week I got most of the small fires stamped out but there are still a lot left that aren’t in my purview to put out that can flare up again. This is just the most recent in a long string of problems that goes back 20 years or more. Here is where I insert a long string of expletives but that would make our wonderful moderators unhappy so I’ll pass.

I regret that I lost the momentum that I had with my writing. I was really proud of the posts on this journal. I was very prolific (for me) and now I have to get back into the writing zone again.

Today I am finally going to get to the play that started this Journal: “Love Song” but first …

This really does pertain to “Love Song”. It’s about blocking. Blocking refers to how the actors move around the stage.

When I tell the story of the play, I have a number of arrows in my quiver: First is the script. We’ll set that aside for now. Next is the set itself: Is it realistic or suggested? Look at the photo’s I’ve included on these posts, most of the sets are very realistic. They look like the house or the room where the action takes place. I will attach a couple of photos from the play “Noises Off” where you can see the front of the set (with 7 of the 8 doors needed) and a photo of what the set looks like from the back. (In “Noises Off” the set is actually turned front to back so the audience can see what is happening back stage during the second act of play.)

Other plays like the Arthur series and Torso have minimal sets – often just a pieces of fabric hung from the ceiling. The set is very important in telling the audience of the time and place of the play.

Lighting is very important in telling the story of the play. Think of “Wait Until Dark” where the absence of light tells us about what it feels like to be blind. In general, the lighter the story, the brighter the lights: A comedy will be brightly lit and a drama will be much dimmer with lots of shadows. If you’ve ever seen a play, you will have seen dozens to hundreds of lights, and each one can be individually controlled. By using filters we can set the tone of the scene: Rose colored filters make the scene warm and loving. Blue makes the scene look cold and confrontational. Amber will make the set look old and candle lit. It all goes into putting the audience into the mood the director wants in that portion of the play.

The next arrow is sound. In this case, I’m not talking about music to accompany singers but sounds that are part of the plot: Thunder, cars starting and driving away. Not too many years ago, sound was generated live: A piece of metal would be shaken to generate the sound of thunder, doors would be slammed off stage to simulate actions that did not take place on stage. Fifty or sixty years ago, with the advent of easily recorded sound effects, the use of sound on stage took a small leap forward: We started to use recorded ambiance during the play: The sound of crickets outdoors at night; the sound of diners in a restaurant; the sound of a car starting and driving away. In the meantime, movies were using music throughout the movie to set the mood.. Think of the theme from “Jaws” to see what sound can accomplish or the soundtrack of “Jurassic Park”.

Over the past few years I have started to use sound inside my plays to set the mood. We used a penny whistle and drum in the first Arthur play, a flute in the second. “Torso” used sound throughout the play to set the mood of the scene. Purists don’t like sound/music in a play. It can easily be overdone but used properly, I think it helps a lot.

Costumes help more than you might imagine. It will tell the audience a lot about the character: Is she wealthy? Is she organized? Does she have taste? What is her age? What is the period and location of the play? The French Revolution? The wild west? Medieval Britain? and so on.

There are several other arrows available to the Director: Makeup, furniture, paint colors and so on.

What I want to talk about is blocking. Next to the words of the script and the delivery of the words by a actor, blocking is the most important element to telling the story. A well blocked play will tell the story without any words. How do I explain it? I need to back up and brag a little.

Each year Lincoln Center Theater in New York, invites 60 or so directors from all over the world to a “laboratory” to investigate issues facing the theater. In 2007, I got a copy of the invitation to apply. They were looking for directors early in their directing career. At that point, I was early in my directing career even though i was retired and 65 years old. I applied and was accepted. (When I got there I was at least twice as old as any of the other directors. They have since changed the application to ask for “young directors early in their careers” >:(

Anyway, the Lab was life changing for me. It validated what I did and what I thought about in the theater. I remember one discussion the group had with the famous British Director, Richard Eyre. He was describing his career. He said that early on, he would build a model of the set and move little paper actors around on the set to figure out what to do. I did that too!!

Then he reached the point where he could pretty much see the set in his mind and envision how the actors moved around on it. I did that too!!!

Finally, he reached to point where he let his actors find their blocking. He said to his actors: “Show me what you got” then he would adjust what he saw from the actors until he got the picture he wanted. That’s what I do!!!

To this day, I always let the actors find their way through the scene first then make adjustments. I repeat: A well blocked play will tell the story without any words. Do the actors move closer to each other? Further apart? Do they look at each other? Each sentence in a well written play will have an obvious movement associated with it. The one thing I want to avoid is “talking heads”: Two people sitting or standing and delivering their lines without any movement.

Another (short) digression: The first task we undertake when rehearsing a play is the rough blocking. The actors are in the process of memorizing their lines and the real work can’t begin until the memorizing is done. During this period we work on the rough blocking of the play. The amount of blocking accomplished varies greatly: Sometime we will spend six hours on one minute of the play, sometimes we can do 15 minutes of play time in three hours. Another problem is that we work out the blocking then may not revisit it for a week or more. To keep track of the blocking we use our Stage Manager to record what is going on. During these rehearsals our Stage Manager writes all of the movement of the actors in the script. A good SM will have developed a shorthand to record all the movement on stage. I have the luxury of working with an extremely talented Stage Manager who can record every nuance of what is happening on the stage. Always writing in pencil so it can be easily erased. I’m a director, that means I can change my mind. 😉

Notice that I call it the “rough blocking”. With experienced actors, as they find their characters, they will start to find things that work for them that was not the way we originally blocked it. (Remember our discussion of the hard working actors? They will experiment with many things, including blocking, throughout the rehearsal period.) I always get my Stage manager BIG erasers!!

There are literally thousands of ways a play can be blocked. There are hundreds of ways to communicate the story to the audience. There are a few ways that are really good but there is only one way that screams “this is the right blocking” to me. Sometimes I can see what we need to do. Sometimes we have to look for it. Sometimes, it may not appear for weeks. Sometimes even after the show opens. Sometimes I’ll find it, sometimes the actors will find it. But when it is right, everyone can see it. it’s like a great light bulb turns on.

I’m almost out of time for today but I will tie this to “Love Song”. At our last rehearsal a husband and wife are discussing her brother – something she doesn’t want to hear right now. I had her walk away from her husband. The direction I sent her in took her between the chair he was sitting in and a coffee table. Instead of walking away from him, she got closer to him and knelt beside his chair to press her wishes. Very different that I had envisioned but far more powerful. It was the perfect action – not to say there isn’t an even more perfect action – but that one moment made the rehearsal for me. I was a happy camper!!!

More next time.

Doug B

Before I start:

I don’t know why I started to write this journal. I’m not known as an autobiographical writer. Before 2007, the only things I wrote were technical documents, financial analyses and reports. 2007 was one of the low points in my life. My wife was battling lung cancer, my daughter was battling her physical and emotional issues.

I went to a week long acting training program (which is a topic for another day). During one of the few breaks in the training program, I was talking to a friend about what was going on inside me and she told me that I needed to write a journal – to sort out and understand what was happening to me. For the first time (but not the last) she said I was a bomb about to explode. So I started to write a journal. For a reason I’ll never understand, my journals came out as plays. Over the next few years I wrote almost 100 short plays and 6 or 8 finished and unfinished full length plays. Rereading those plays today, I see them as metaphors of what was going on in my life. Other people usually can’t see what is underneath the metaphor but I know. And that’s what’s important.

In 2007 I was in New York for several weeks and I got to see the Pulitzer Prize winning play “Dinner With Friends” by Donald Margulies. I went to see the play in an Off-Broadway workshop production because it was directed by one of the instructors from the training program I mentioned above and I knew one of the stars in the play from the training program.

Anyway, I liked the play far more than I thought I would. (I had read the play a couple of times and didn’t see anything particularly compelling about it.) You’ve heard me say this before but I thought the playwright and director told the wrong story. So I set out to write the story I thought should have been told.

I worked on the play for well over a year, getting it to just the point I wanted. It went through several total re-writes as I polished it. Along with the re-writes the title of the play changed several times from “Coffee With A Friend” to finally “Husbands And Other Lovers”. When I had polished it to (what I thought was) brilliance, I circulated it to several friends. That list has gradually expanded to a couple dozen friends. No one liked it. Not a single person. I got lots of feedback on what was wrong with it: “It isn’t funny enough”; “It needs older actors”; “You can do better than this”; “It’s trite, predictable and done to death.” and so on. Over the next year I rewrote it a couple of times to address the issues raised but the reviews didn’t improve. I finally realized that the play no longer told the story I originally set out to tell: It had been written by committee. By trying to incorporate what everyone wanted, it no longer meant anything to me.

I stopped writing. I made a couple of half hearted efforts to write plays but my heart wasn’t into it. A very good friend finally told me: “This play is eating a hole in you. You need to get past it. You run the theater. Do it. It’s not going to stop eating at you until you get it on stage.”

He was right. BUT . . . After I thought about it I realized that IF it was as bad as everyone said (and I had to give that possibility some credibility – after all they were my friends and if my friends didn’t like it, what would an audience think of it?) So I put the play aside and, though I continue to pull it out from time to time and have made a short play out of what I thought were the best parts, I have finally been able to get past it. For what it’s worth, several months ago I made another rewrite of the shorter version and gave it to a friend to read and told her: “If you don’t like it, just tell me you haven’t read it yet.” So far she hasn’t read it yet . . . . . (Yes, I have asked her.)

So seven years after writing “Husbands And Other Loves” I am writing again. But not plays this time. I don’t know why. Just because.

Before I get back to “Love Song” there is one more thing I want to talk about: The week long acting training workshop. In the early days, the workshop took place on Orcas Island. Called SOAR (Seattle-Orcas Acting Retreat), the program started on Sunday at noon and ended the following Sunday at noon. There have been a few things that I have done in my life that were really “life Changing”. This acting program was one – even though I was technically a director at the time.

Another was a three day training program about how to negotiate: How to negotiate with unions, how to negotiate for a new car and how to negotiate when the other entity has all the power (like a government agency).

Without digressing too far: With a government agency, there is ALWAYS something they want more than money. You just have to find it. A case in point is the Bonneville Power Administration. At the time I was CEO of our local power company. Every year we paid BPA $2,500,000 for power. A lot of money? Yes. But to BPA, with a $4,000,000,000 budget, maybe not a lot of money.

Every two years, BPA adjusted their wholesale power rates based on projections for the next two years. During one of these rate cases the overwhelming number of BPA customers were trying to buy as little power from BPA as possible because there were going to be cheaper sources of power (remember Enron?). BPA was getting a lot of political pressure to let their utility customers buy as little power from BPA as possible. Our power company (and a couple other small BPA customers) went just the other way: We wanted to buy all of our power from BPA for as long as they would let us. BPA was so happy to have a few customers to stand up for them on a regional and national level that they offered us a five year fixed price contract. We signed the contract along with a couple of other utilities. When all the dust had settled, our contract was about 60% of what all the other utilities had to pay. There was something that BPA wanted more than money: Political support from their customers.

Okay, back to the topic (sub-topic? Sub-sub Topic? Sub-sub-sub Topic?):

Life Changing: The workshop was expensive: Tuition $500, Room and Board $500 plus travel to get there. The instructors were world class. With 20 to 25 students, the class size was 4 to 6 people. I learned a lot about acting but I learned even more about directing and even more about the world of acting. After the first year, the class moved off Orcas Island to a small town on the Olympic Peninsula and was renamed to AIRE (Actors International Retreat Experience).

Each day started off with a group breakfast at 7 am, classes ’till noon, then lunch the more classes until 4 or 5 pm, then a break them dinner and a two or three hour session between 7 and 10 pm. When there was a break, we spent it with our assigned scene partner running lines from the scene we would be doing together.

The after dinner session was always special. Each instructor had a night, it might be Shakespeare one night; a mystical improvised journey the next and something to do with movement another night. Saturday was our opportunity to show the others in our class what we had been working on all week. In the morning were the scenes, in the afternoon simulated auditions for roles we had been studying. After dinner there was a big party where the students and instructors could do anything they wanted: Sing, dance, inprov, or whatever. Great way to end the session.

It was clear to me the there were not enough actors to support the fixed cost of the program. I worked hard to get actors I knew to attend. It got to the point where half the class were people I had recruited for the program.

After a couple of years it became clear to me that the biggest problem was the target audience: Young professional actors. These actors were, for the most part, not making a living from acting but had day jobs to put bread on the table and actors at night. $1,500 for a week (including airfare) was more than they could afford. I suggested to the workshop leader that, between us, we could broaden the group to community theater people like those from Orcas. Most to the Orcas people who attended were later in their lives and were retired or at least had jobs that enabled them to afford the workshop. My suggestion was summarily rejected and the program failed two years later.

I tried to restart the program for several years but was always blocked in my efforts.

I’m really sorry that the program doesn’t exist any more. The people who took those workshops are the best actors around here.

That’s it for today. I’ll try to get back to Love Song” Next time.

Doug

I want to continue the topic I started yesterday.

Acting is clearly an art.  The actor creates a performance for their character, just as a painter creates a work of art in their painting.  But:  In both cases, there is a craft to the art.  The painter needs to understand the differences in different media, the actor need to understand the craft of acting.  That is where many aspiring actors fall short.  Yes, you can learn to act by getting on stage and learning on the job.  A painter can also learn about media and styles and brushes by trial and error.

As the director of a play, I spend a good amount of time teaching the newer actors the basics of theater.  Time I really don’t have.  Today we are going to talk about actors who have talent and have taken significant amounts of training.  Some of the actors I work with majored or minored in theater in college.  A great start.   Others, who may have found acting later in life, are able to take ongoing acting classes.  Also a great way to learn the craft.

Several years ago, I was holding auditions for a play.  One by one the actors came on stage to read from the script.  One actor, was rolling around on the stage floor as he read his lines.  I cast him and later asked him what he was doing during the audition.  He said that in college there were so many people auditioning for each role, you had to do something to catch the directors eye.  I told him that he caught my eye but I cast him anyway.

The naturals may be good but it is the hard working actors that form the spine that makes a play work.  Rereading what I wrote yesterday, I made it sound like the Director did all the work.  Not so.  The director is the guide but it is the actor who finally develops the character.  Early on in rehearsals,the director understands the character better than the actor.  There comes a point in the rehearsal process where the actor understands the character they have built better than I do, and I yield to what they think (usually).

Hard working actors take risks.  It’s scary to be on stage, particularly when the scene calls for crying, kissing, sexually suggestive scenes or partial nudity.  Some actors skate around the edges, hoping that the Director will forget about it.  Others just jump in.

A few years ago, I directed a play that required an actress to strip to her bra and panties and climb into bed with her scene partner.  These were not granny panties but something a young woman would actually wear (she used her own clothes).  I was nervous about it and was holding back.  One night a good friend (and great actress) came to the rehearsal and said we needed to get it on, we needed to get past the giggle stage.  She was right and we did it.  By the time the show opened, the actor was so comfortable in her bra and panties she never even thought about it.  That is brave.

Several years ago, we presented “Wait Until Dark”, a play based on the movie with Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin about a blind woman who is terrorized by criminals looking for drugs.  The woman who played Suzy, the blind woman, actually taught herself to not see.  She was able to ignore the visual signals from her eye the the point that, a couple of years after the show had closed, she was in a Costco about 40 miles away and a man came up to her and said “You can see.”  She had no idea what he was talking about.  He explained that he had been on Orcas and had come to the production and thought it was wonderful that we had cast a blind person in that role.  That is a hard working actor!!  (Also one of my top five all time plays.)

As long as I am talking about “Wait Until Dark”, I want to digress and talk about some of the things we did that made it such a wonderful play.  Digress?  Me?

All great plays start with a great script.  At least a script the looks and sounds great to me.  A great play needs great actors.  Besides the actor who played Suzy, the actor who played Roat was just perfect in that role.  Really scary.  Really believable.  The other actors were also very good but the play is about Suzy and Roat:  Who will live and who will die.  Talk about high stakes!!!

Like we did with “Almost, Maine” we made a road trip to see the play at another theater about 150 miles away.  We learned a lot about what worked but even more about what didn’t work.  For example, in the second act, when Suzy knows the Roat will be coming to kill her, she breaks or disconnects all the lights in the room to put them on an even footing.  In the off island production we saw, the light in the tech booth spilled out and we could see everything that was happening.  In our production, I spent three days making sure there was not a bit of light in the entire building.  We even had people holding up signs to block the light from the exit signs.  We turned off the monitors on the computers in the tech booth.  One of the reviewers said that she could understand what it felt like to be blind and know what is happening only by the sounds of people moving around.  When Roat opens the refrigerator door and the room is lit by the light in the refrigerator, people in the audience screamed.  Every night.  Even those who knew what was coming screamed.

The script has three scenes in Act II.  I the off island production we saw, one of the bad guys (the good bad guy) is killed by Roat.  In the scene change, we watched the guy who was killed get up and walk off stage.  Every time you have a scene change the audience drops out of the moment of watching the play and it takes three to five minutes to get them back “in the moment”.  I didn’t want that.  Once the tension starts to build in Act II, I didn’t want to let the audience to have a chance to release the tension.  We did Act II as one scene.  It took us a long time to figure out how to kill Talman and get his body off stage without stopping the action.  Finally, after Talman has shown his good side and is trying to help Suzy, he starts to exit.  He opens the door, then turns back to Suzy to say his last line.  All of a sudden, we see Roat’s face over Talman’s shoulder.  The audience gasps and Roat stabs Talman.  Then as Talman collapses, Roat eases him off stage while Suzy screams as she is trying to figure out what is happening.

The other scene change is to cover a 20 or 30 minute period as Roat goes on a wild goose chase to get the drugs.  We covered that time with about three minutes of time with Suzy preparing for the inevitable return of Roat.  No one ever noticed the time disconnect because they were so engrossed in the play.

I loved how we made the audience scream.  I have been looking for another really scary thriller ever since without luck.

Now back to the main point (no not, “Love Song” but we are getting closer):  Types of actors.

The final group are those who don’t have a clue and don’t seem particularly interested in getting a clue.  They are actors who stay “in their head”.  Think back to yesterday when I talked about all the questions I ask actors.  What I am trying to do is build a internal world inside the actor that their character inhabits.  That is the only way that actors can be truthful.  A friend calls it:  “Being truthful in the imaginary circumstances of the play”.

People who are “in their heads” try to figure out how to say their lines – a mechanical process at best.  Something that will never appear real on the stage although those actors believe they are saying their line right.  I have had several of this type of actors tell me:  I know my lines, I know my blocking.  Why do I have to come to rehearsals?  They don’t have a clue.

I also need to add that some actors are just not able to get out of their heads no matter how much training they get.  There  is something inside them that will not let go and needs to be in control all the time.  They have a clue but still aren’t good actors.

Which reminds me of a story:

When Jack Nicholson was just beginning in the movies, he was doing a scene in a movie.  His director kept telling him “Less, Jack”.  Nicholson would do the scene again and again the director would say “Less, Jack”.  Finally after several iterations, the director said “Less, Jack”.  Jack Nicholson told him:  “If I do any less, I won’t be acting at all.”  “Precisely”, said the director.

Don’t act:  Just Be.  Be the character.  Something I tell my actors all the time:  “Trust the work and just say your lines.”  If you have worked hard, it will be right.

A photo of Wait Until Dark