Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
2010/2011 Season
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April 13, 2011
Summertime
The second day of rehearsal just started, and the cast is sitting around the upright piano as Music Director Doug Peck walks them through the first scene of Porgy and Bess. With Director Charlie Newell observing nearby, Doug begins by asking the actors to read the libretto (ie. the lyrics) out loud like a regular play script, and we hear Harriet Plumpp (Clara) read aloud the words to “Summertime.”
Summertime
And the livin’ is easy.
Fish are jumpin’,
And the cotton is high.
Oh your daddy’s rich
And your mama’s good-lookin’
So hush little baby
Don’t you cry.
Spoken by Harriet, the words shed their familiarity. In the story, it’s a lullaby that Clara sings to her infant child; it’s a hauntingly beautiful introduction to the world of Catfish Row, but also a premonition of tragedy to come. Doug then asks Harriet and the cast to sing the full song again, marking the first time we sing “Summertime” in this rehearsal process. No matter how many times you’ve heard it, the music of “Summertime” never fails to seduce and unsettle, especially with the full import of the story.
Today’s rehearsal is all about jumping straight into learning the music for Gershwin’s score, but yesterday’s first rehearsal was all about Charlie, Doug, Ron OJ Parson (our Resident Artist, and here joining us as an artistic consultant) and the designers catching the actors up on nearly two years of thinking and preparation for Court’s Porgy and Bess. Charlie emphasized his desire to discover the original creative and emotional impulses that prompted the creation of Porgy and Bess, most notably DuBose Heyward and, later, George Gershwin’s encounter with the African American Gullah culture of Charleston, South Carolina. For Heyward, explained Charlie, a white man and the heir to a fallen Southern aristocracy, his fascination with Gullah culture was inherited from his mother, Jane. Jane Heyward was widowed when DuBose was young (his father was killed in a rice mill accident), and she found strength and solace in the lifestyle and spirituality of Charleston’s Gullah culture. Scenic designer John Culbert and costume designer Jacqueline Firkins also presented their visions for Porgy and Bess, which eschew the typical “romantic realism” of past productions of the opera in favor of a simple, abstracted design. Some people will think that we didn’t have enough money for a real set, explained Culbert; but the intention is to remove the distractions of the environment to allow the human drama to come to the fore.
The set model for Porgy and Bess. The main feature of the set is a simple white deck surrounded by simple white benches, inspired by the praise house, a simple chapel found in the Gullah culture. The costumes are based on 1920s designs and fabric cuts, but the materials will be white cotton and linen—the simplicity was inspired by photographs of Gullah baptismal rituals.
January 18, 2011
Three Tall Women: Previews
Edward Albee and his mother in 1962. (Bert Morgan/Getty Images)
We can never predict how audiences will respond to our productions, or what questions each play will provoke. That’s why the first weekend of previews is an exciting time for those of us who have witnessed the play’s journey from its selection up through its final rehearsals. Those first few audiences complete our act of interpretation; they crystallize the play’s meaning, hopefully affirming the reasons we selected the play in the first place, and sometimes even showing us a facet of the text we hadn’t seen before. This weekend, we learned three important lessons about Three Tall Women:
1. Never underestimate the audience’s intelligence. A major conceptual shift occurs midway through this play, and we questioned how well audience members would “get it.” The responses we received demonstrated that audiences don’t need us to hold their hands through difficult material.
2. Audience members recognize their loved ones in Lois Markle’s character of A. Several people who stayed for our post-show discussions told us that the physical and mental deterioration of A, in its complex tragicomedy, reminded them of a mother, grandmother, or spouse who had gone through a similar process of dying.
3. Certain audience members questioned our program’s description of Albee as an “adopted” son, especially given that the play itself doesn’t refer to the character of the son (a fictional version of Albee) as adopted. Many of these comments came from men and women who work in adoption services, or were indeed parents of adopted children themselves. We did indeed have internal conversations about this issue in advance, and we made the choice to print the fact because Albee himself sees it as an important fact of his life. Moreover, we found this quote from Albee important: “I’d like to think that I can be more objective than a lot of people can. I think my objectivity began very early as an orphan. Being adopted, I didn’t have the feeling that most kids have, that these were the people who made me. That sense of familial obligation wasn’t clouding up my responses to them.” We found this sentiment significant in relation to Three Tall Women, which is rooted deeply in Albee’s own real relationship to his mother.
There are three more preview performances of Three Tall Women remaining before Saturday’s opening, each one featuring a post-show discussion with artists from the production. Come out and share your thoughts with us!
Court Theatre’s Three Tall Women runs Wednesday through Sunday until February 13, 2011.
January 10, 2011
Albee on Directors
“No performance can make a great play any better than it is, and most performances are inadequate either in that the minds at work are just not up to the task no matter how sincerely they try, or the stagers are aggressively interested in “interpretation” or “concept” with the result that our experience of the play, as an audience, is limited, is only partial.
“...The problem is further compounded by the kind of theater we have today for the most part—a director’s theater, where interpretation, rethinking, cutting, pasting, and even the rewriting of the author’s text, often without the author’s permission, are considered acceptable behavior. While we playwrights are delighted that our craft and art allows us double access to people interested in theater—through both text and performance—we become upset when that becomes a double-edged sword. I am convinced that in proper performance all should vanish—acting, direction, design, even writing—and we should be left with the author’s intention uncluttered. The killer is the assumption that interpretation is on a level with creation.
“I’m not suggesting you should not see plays. There are a lot of swell productions, but keep in mind that production is an opinion, an interpretation, and unless you know the play on the page, the interpretation you’re getting is secondhand and may differ significantly from the author’s intentions. Of course, your reading of a play is also an opinion, an interpretation, but there are fewer hands (and minds) in the way of your engagement with the author.”
Edward Albee, from the essay “Read Plays?” in Stretching My Mind
Three Tall Women runs from January 13, 2011 to February 13, 2011 at Court Theatre.
January 6, 2011
Young Albee
This photo of a young Edward Albee has been highly influential to Court’s production of Three Tall Women. In the play, a character appears who speaks no lines, and is known only as the “Boy.” Nevertheless, his role in the play is pivotal; the character has been implicitly acknowledged by Albee to be a version of the playwright himself. In our production, the Boy is played by Joel Gross, who has the challenging task of communicating an ocean of history and emotion without any text.
Joel Gross, far right, as Dakin in TimeLine’s 2009 production of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys:
Three Tall Women runs January 12, 2011 through February 13, 2011 at Court Theatre.
January 5, 2011
Albee on Broadway
Members of the nerd community may already be aware that you can now view twenty years of Charlie Rose interviews online. The official website now hosts six separate interviews with playwright Edward Albee: this is the most recent.
ALBEE: I think any playwright who doesn’t ask lots of questions is wasting your time. That’s why most of Broadway is not worth going to—because there are no questions, just an awful lot of easy answers being given.
CHARLIE ROSE: But is that because there are no plays being put on Broadway like that because nobody wants to go to Broadway to see that?
ALBEE: The audience that goes to Broadway is, I think, being misinformed as to what the nature of theater is.
Three Tall Women did well on Broadway in the 1990’s, though even just fifteen years later it’s difficult to imagine such a challenging play surviving for very long on Broadway today, unless it starred three very expensive celebrity actresses. Albee has had a complicated relationship with Broadway all his life; Broadway has been the gateway for most of his work, and yet he remains its most outspoken critic.
Three Tall Women runs January 12, 2011 through February 13, 2011 at Court Theatre.
