Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
December 18, 2008
Everything’s Pretty Much Already Been Invented
It’s First Rehearsal again. This one, The Wild Duck, is the show I’ve been waiting for since last February. The cast is outrageous—they’ve all worked at Court before, in some of our best shows (Hamlet, The Glass Menagerie, Carousel, Titus Andronicus). Jay Whittaker is back in town! It’s a smaller group than the Caroline cast (11 instead of 18), which was the last of these big rehearsal-room gatherings we had. The table feels sort of empty by comparison. We’re missing two actors today, so I’ll be reading the part of Old Werle (for John Rieger, oh my god)—two angry scenes opposite Jay, whose work as Tom in Menagerie was basically mind-blowing to my fresh-out-of-college aesthetic. I’m pretty nervous.
Charlie’s introduction, paraphrased (I had to take longhand notes on the back of my script instead of the usual furious typing):
“My journey with The Wild Duck began when I moved to Washington, DC after college, to apprentice at Arena Stage. This was 1984. They were bringing in Lucian Pintilie, a Romanian director, to remount his famous Paris production of this play with an American cast, and I was asked to assist him. This was a major formative experience—it changed my DNA as a director, partly because of Ibsen’s play, but mostly because of Lucian. The doors he opened for me in two areas of the director’s craft were essential to all the work I’ve done since, and I’m still exploring them. The first revelation was of a director’s clear, powerful, dangerous vision for a play. Lucian’s images were profound and provocative, and his confidence in them was unshakeable. His approach to the text was rigorous and extremely intelligent—he took nothing for granted. The version we used was his own adaptation, which pointed up the ridiculousness, the outrageous comic potential of these characters, as well as his own strong political point of view. The second of Lucian’s revelations was of actor process; the size of passion and gesture that actors are capable of while still maintaining the rigor of craft and storytelling. All of you have worked with me before, and you don’t know it but whenever I speak about acting, or the process of creating a role, I’m quoting Lucian.
“Three years after that Arena production, which was a legendary moment for those who saw it, I was assisting the late, great Garland Wright at the Guthrie. And because I had worked on the DC production, I worked on Garland, who was wary of big personalities like Lucian—perhaps because his own left little room for another!—to bring The Wild Duck to the Guthrie. So I got to assist Lucian again, to bring this profound production to another audience, and again the people who saw that show still talk about the effect it had on them.
“Like the film Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano which transformed how I understand Chekhov, Lucian’s Wild Duck made me see Ibsen in a completely new way. Ibsen is alive and present for me, his judgments and insights inform my world because the heights of Lucian’s staging and his direction of the actors were unforgettable. I wrote down every word he said through those two rehearsal processes, and for years I thought, I can’t do The Wild Duck because I’ll only want to do what Lucian did. But now it’s 23 years later and I came back to the text and thought, now’s the time. I’m ready now—but I’ve gotta get the A-team to do this with me.
“This process is going to be different from the others we’ve done together. In part that’s because I know this play better—I know exactly what it is, inside and out. And so I need to push myself, and you need to push me, to move past the answers I’ve already got. It’s not like Titus, where the point was that I had to discover the mechanics of that play along with you. I want to start from answers and push past them to new questions, harder questions. I’m not going to be thinking about “Does Kevin like me today?” or how to keep you feeling safe and comfortable—we need to live at a place of discomfort, so that we don’t just rely on knowing where we’re headed. If that makes you nervous, that’s good. I’m scared. This one needs to be scary. The piece demands that we be more than we are right now.”
More to come…
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