Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
October 18, 2011
An Iliad in Rehearsal
Today was the first day back in rehearsal for An Iliad after a scheduled week-long hiatus designed to give actor Timothy Edward Kane time to learn the script and digest the ideas developed in the first week of rehearsal. So, of course, I thought i’d go check it out. I came into the rehearsal room right after Tim had finished working through half of the play’s script (no small feat to be sure). After a fairly silent, somewhat pensive five minute break, director and actor started going through the text they had covered page by page.
And my goodness it was intense. There were five extra people in the room including myself, but I felt somewhat like we had disappeared in the swirl of ideas and questions firing back and forth between Charlie and Tim. I couldn’t follow their whole conversation, but what struck me was how open-ended the questions were and how vast the ideas. Everything was explored and nothing was decided. It was like a hoard of question marks and exclamation points were accumulating in the rehearsal room, floating around and bumping into one another. Where are the muses? What are the muses? Who is The Poet? Why does he say that? Why Hector? Why Achilles? Why, why, why??? And at the climax of all these questions, with a half hour left, Tim donned a cloak, sash, and head covering, took a crouched position upstage and began intoning the first lines of the play (which just happen to be in ancient Greek).
I watched him perform the same beginning page and a half of the script about six times—each performance completely different than the former. And the questions didn’t stop. They came pouring out with the lines, they were muttered sotto voce, and they even seemed to permeate the silences.
I thought by coming to rehearsal today that I would get some answers to the questions I asked in my blog post about the first rehearsal. Little did I know, the real questions have only just begun.
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