Crazy day at rehearsal.
As I've mentioned before, we are working at a fast pace. A lot of times, all we have time for with a given scene is to read it over once, briefly talk about, and then try to get a rough idea of what the blocking is. Many times, we don't even have time to go back and run it once. We are expected to remember what we did. I tell my students that breaks aren't always breaks. Breaks are sometimes the time where you sit down and write yourself a bunch of notes so you can remember how a given scene went. Because of the way we work, it may be up to a week before we look at a given scene a second time and we'll be expected to remember the work that we did the first time AND we'll be expected to have improved on it.
Today was different. We allotted nearly three hours to work Act IV scene i. Part of this was because we have a couple of actors in another show and they had a performance tonight so this limited us a bit as to what scenes we could work today. We started with our typical reading of the play, and then our blocking of the play. I got mad at myself during this part. I knew my lines but I was shaky on my cues. It's a difficult scene in terms of cues... I'll talk about that in a bit... and I wasn't always on top of it. This is why it is so important to run lines with someone while you are learning them... step one of memorization is learning your lines... step two is making sure you know when to say them!
So when we got to break I was a little pissed at myself that I had to hold my script. Granted, just about everyone had script in hand, but I felt like I wasn't quite where I wanted to be at first. But, I had a moment in the bathroom where I had to look at myself in the mirror and just tell myself to shake it off and keep pushing to do good work.
I have a chunk in this scene that is tough because I am having a conversation with Iago while Othello is hiding and commenting on what he is hearing us say. So while my line is in reaction to Iago, I sometimes have to wait for the actor playing Othello to say his line before I can respond. Cassio doesn't hear anything Othello is saying... but Chris the actor has to listen for David the actor to finish his line before Chris as Cassio can respond to Ryan as Iago. Craziness... I guess I should forgive myself a little bit for not having my cues pick-ups perfect.
ANYWAY....
We did our read-through and blocking and still had an hour to spare. So we had a chance to run it again... which was real nice... and get notes which was real nice... and we still had about half an hour to spare.
So, everyone was cut from the scene except myself, Iago, and Othello, and the three of us, along with the director, really dove into about 30 lines of the scene and really started to flesh it out. And it was great. Crafting that small chunk of the scene line-by-line... getting into some deeper acting work than what we usually have had time for thus far... at least in much of the scenes I have worked. One hour into the rehearsal I was frustrated with myself but by the end of the day I left excited. I need to hold onto that because I doubt that little chunk will ever get time devoted to it again.
Side note - As I drove to rehearsal today it was 109 degrees. Most of the time we try to rehearse outside at this small ampitheatre on the campus of Marian University, however sometimes we work indoors at Butler University. I am very thankful we decided to switch locations from Marian to Butler today.
Shout out of the day goes to "Hana" D. Thanks for checking in from the U.K.
Shout out of the day also goes to Judge John Roberts. Not trying to get all political with this blog but that was a hell of a call.
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