Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
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January 11, 2010
Tech Weekend
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the most pleasant weekend of tech I’ve experienced in recent memory. So often we’re racing against time to assemble all the moving parts and production elements of a show just so that the thing can stand on its own two feet by the final dress rehearsal. Because of the simple, elegant design of The Year of Magical Thinking, that stress was largely alleviated, allowing Mary Beth and I and the design team the opportunity to spend the weekend honing specific moments in the story.
The design team for this play has been a veritable dream team. We have Jennifer Tipton designing lights, Susan Hilferty designing clothes, my long-time collaborator John Culbert on the set, and Andre Pluess on sound. I’m also working for the first time with Mike Tutaj, who has created a startling and sublime video design for the production. Much of this weekend was given over to orchestrating what we’ve come to call the “magical thinking” moments of the play: moments where the character of Joan slips into a non-rational understanding of the traumatic events surrounding her. Mary Beth has continued to play an important role as co-collaborator, to the point where she often sits in the house to study her own light, sound, and video cues and offer her feedback.
Officially we have three more working days until the first preview, and there’s still much work to be done. Striking the right tone at the opening and the closing of the play are of the utmost importance (“How do we start? How do we end?”) and those are the moments that Mary Beth and I are still fine-tuning. In this show more than most, divinity is all in the details. There’s always the possibility that some of our thinking will completely change when we get our first audience—but that’s a thrill I look forward to with every show!
January 8, 2010
The Year of Magical Thinking Rehearsals
Welcome to Court Theatre’s blog, Open Rehearsal! I’m Artistic Director Charlie Newell, and I’ll be chronicling my rehearsal process of The Year of Magical Thinking all the way up through our first preview on January 14 and beyond. The process for this upcoming show has been so unusual and personally challenging that I thought it worthwhile to share it here.
The Year of Magical Thinking is Joan Didion’s dramatic adaptation of her own memoir. It is a moving but piercingly honest account of the death of her husband, John, and the year of disorientation that followed. The play also chronicles the death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana, less than two years later. Written for only a single actor, it is an Everest of dramatic writing.
Despite the unexpected pleasure of getting my wisdom teeth removed last month, Mary Beth Fisher and I began rehearsal on The Year of Magical Thinking in early December and continued all the way up to our holiday break. Because this play is written for only one actor, our rehearsals have been more flexible, though not less focused. Mary Beth and I are free to test-drive new ideas, thoughts, and instincts about Joan Didion’s text as they crop up, and the dead ends we discover are equally important to the breakthroughs. A constant concern of ours, of course, is to modulate the tone of the piece. We face two pitfalls: on the one hand, sentimentality, and on the other, cold detachment. Every day, like frontier surveyors, we discover a little bit more of the emotional truth of the text.
This week we finished up our time in the rehearsal hall with a full-blown run-through of the show for our design team, and I’m thrilled with how far the piece has come. Today we move into the theater to begin tech, but even as my immediate attention turns to lights and sound and space, I still haven’t completed my work with Mary Beth. Just this week the two of us discovered a new understanding of the last third of the show, and I’m eager to try out our new ideas!
December 21, 2009
A Coda to IRMA VEP
A week ago Court Theatre closed The Mystery of Irma Vep with a bittersweet final performance that also witnessed the victory lap for Ellen, our long-time stage manager, who is retiring from stage management forever (she tells us). This was one show that I never wanted to close. If I was forced to choose one performance to take with me on a desert island for all eternity, it would be Erik and Sully and The Mystery of Irma Vep.
Two days after closing, I was in New York. I had a few hours to kill in the village, so I found my way to Sheridan Square, the location of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. The little square it overlooks now contains a high-end optometrist, a Starbucks, and a pet store selling puppies in the window (underneath an unmarked photograph of Mickey Rourke, smiling, holding a puppy up to the camera). The Ridiculous is gone; in its place is a new theater company. I spent half an hour looking around the front door of Axis like a tourist for any trace of the Ridiculous that I could photograph and put on this blog, but there isn’t a shred of evidence that it was once Ludlam’s theatrical home. In Court’s program I’d written that the little parcel of street outside the building had been renamed Charles Ludlam Lane, but the place itself suggested otherwise: there wasn’t a single sign or marker indicating as much.
So do our most cherished performances meet the fate of the ephemeral. But where are the snows of yester-year?
One Sheridan Square, former site of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company
December 9, 2009
One Night Only: IRMA VEP UNPLUGGED
If you haven’t already bought your tickets for The Mystery of Irma Vep, come to the performance this Thursday, December 10th at 7:30 PM, where we’ll present a special one-night-only jam session on guitar and banjo with actors Erik Hellman and Chris Sullivan after the show. These guys have been prepping their repertoire for a few weeks now (hint: it sports a sublime unplugged cover of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”), and it’s a unique opportunity to see the cast in a way that no other audience has. Seats are filling up quickly, so buy your tickets now!
