Meeting Jason, Julia and Herb

Today is Thursday. I wake up thinking hard about the wonderful actors I had seen the day before, and where and how they might fit in the play. I realize of course that what I had been auditioning for the day before was a sense of an actor whose first instinct with the material aligned with mine. With a 6-day rehearsal period, there will be very little excess time, and we need to start from the same page. I love meeting and getting to know new actors - on some primal level, the most exciting thing about making theatre to me is the chance to collide with a group of people extremely intensely. Most theatre makers can attest that the bonds forged in the fire of the rehearsal room last forever - time and circumstance does very little to dull the connections that we make. I think we recognize ourselves in each other, and when we see a colleague walk down the street from a project we've done ten years ago, it is like no time has passed and we pick up where we've left off.

The first meeting of the day is with Jason Quinn, stage manager. Jason has a resume that is longer than my arm. We share a late lunch together at Vynl on 9th Ave., most of which I spent laughing at his various stories from the theatre trenches. He has a great sense of humor, and we seemed to get along - I am looking forward to working with him. Then, a face-to-face meeting with Julia Noulin-Merat, scenic designer, in her studio on 10th Ave. Julia and I have traded many an e-mail and phone conversation in the past month, so it was great to sit down with her and talk through the play. We worked through the story scene by scene, considering all scenic and prop elements and effects we wanted to use. Despite the low budget for the production, we're coming up with some great scenic ideas which will help create the fairy-tale world of the play and give the audience a little visual bang for their buck. The chief scenic design concept is a moving back wall which will embody Peter's mind. The journey the audience will be privy to is his attempt to wrestle memory and imagination into a cohesive whole. Props and items that figure in his consciousness will appear and disappear from drawers in the wall. Julia and I are at work trying to define what the visual aesthetic of the wall should be. One idea is to create a series of alternating cabinets. Another is to use the idea of waves, which to me is a closer representation of memory. By chance, Jason Williamson (the playwright) and I were walking down the road and walked past the below wall in the lobby of a 10th Ave. apartment building:


Clearly, it's come to the moment in the process when every part of my daily experience is beginning to inform decisions I have to make about the play! I love this moment - everything feels alive and full of possibility. The mythical blank canvas is beginning to fill itself, and I can begin to shape and manipulate the colors and shapes that are appearing.

Then, I meet up with ex-DL board member Herb Blodgett to watch Doug Hughes' production of Oleanna, which we discussed at length over dinner at Sardi's afterwards. A thought-provoking and compelling production, featuring a very controlled and surprisingly sympathetic performance from Julia Stiles. Something I love about Doug Hughes' work is that he fully uses every transition to further the telling of the story. He and scenic designer Neil Patel have come up with an extremely simple and powerful visual metaphor for this play - metallic blinds automatically close in on the protagonists of the play at the beginning and end of each scene, immediately conveying a sense of imprisonment and entrapment.

(posted by Ed)