Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
Invisible Man
December 20, 2011
In the Rehearsal Room: Week 1
Invisible Man‘s Dramaturg Jocelyn Prince will be joining the blog once a week to give some us a sneak peak into the rehearsal room. Welcome Jocelyn!
Impressions of Ralph Ellison from his personal friend and literary executor, John Callahan:
Ellison used to wander Harlem incessantly when he was writing Invisible Man. He was a gregarious guy. The novel is based on his personal experiences as a student, musician, and writer. At the start of the Harlem riot of 1943, Ellison was having dinner with a couple who invited him to stay overnight in Queens and all of a sudden, something hit him, and he said, “no, I have to go back to Harlem.” He reported on the riots for the New York Post and also wrote his version of them in Invisible Man.
In the rehearsal room:
This rehearsal process is all about movement. Twisting, turning, ensemble-based physicality. Director Chris McElroen describes his approach to the play as one of circular movement that gets down to the vortex of the Invisible Man. As a jumping off point, we will use the UK company Frantic Assembly’s “round-by-through” technique. This company uses an extremely physical approach into theater, developed by the actors themselves rather than a choreographer.
Chris describes, “We’re going to try a lot of different things. We’re going to manipulate and move him through the space. We have a revolve in the middle of the room, where we’ll disorient him. The trial and error will be finding the fluidity of the piece, and how we operate as one”.
December 13, 2011
The Fear and Joy of Chaos
Today was the first day of rehearsal for Invisible Man, and what a day it was!
John Callahan, Ralph Ellison’s literary executor (and personal friend) summed it up perfectly in his speech to the cast of Invisible Man before they began the first read-through of the script today. He said of his friend:
“Ralph had both fear and joy in chaos”
Fear and joy in chaos. What better way to describe the feeling you have when you’re putting on a world premiere? And not just any world premiere. A world premiere of one of the most seminal, game-changing novels in the history of American literature.
And truly, Invisible Man isn’t just a novel—it’s part of America’s cultural subconscious. Even if you haven’t read the book—it’s all very, very familiar: the ever-unnamed Invisible Man, Monopolated Light and Power, 1,369 lights hanging from the ceiling of a basement on the outskirts of Harlem, Dr. Bledsoe and Mr. Norton, Trueblood and the Golden Day, the Battle Royale, Liberty Paints, the Brotherhood…..“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectopplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to posess a mind”.... We KNOW this work. It’s part of who we are as Americans. And now, for the first time, we are going to get to SEE this work.
Personally, I can’t wait. And not only that, I can’t wait to blog about it. I am going to share everything I can with you about the process of developing this piece for the stage. There are going to be projections and masks and deconstructed jazz standards and the rhythm of the blues and shafts of light and moments of darkness and most of all, the words of Ralph Ellison brought to life.
Let the chaos begin!
John Callahan shakes hands with Teagle Bougere who will be playing the title role.
