Season Two: Week 41

Tuesday / April 2 / 2019
Written by Matt

“You have not done Shakespeare until you’ve helped a man into a dress.”

Final dress rehearsal! Nerves! Mistakes! Frantic saves! People stepping up! People falling down! A runaway band of knights who almost steal the scene from Lear and Goneril!

Today’s run was a blur as we tried to put together all of the pieces in our final run before we have an audience. As so often happens in all sorts of theatres, the final dress was a little rough. We got through the play, and we never had to call a hard stop to totally fix something, but it was close! In Act I scene iv, our knights (of which I am one and definitely guilty) got a little carried away with the “disordered rabble” that makes Goneril’s house “like a riotous inn.” A stern talking-to by Frannie and a few stink-eyes from Lear were all it took to clean up our act, but it was a miracle that Lear and Goneril were able to soldier through it.

A little later on, Kent’s stocks got mixed up in a scene change, and it took some quick thinking on the fly by an imperious Cornwall to save the day. (“Fetch forth the stocks! No! Put them there! Not there! THERE!”)

Tensions rose and fell backstage, as people rushed to cover for each other and then vented their frustrations at someone who missed a cue or a scene partner or a facilitator or anyone else who happened to be sitting around. You know--usual dress rehearsal stuff!

Amidst the chaos, there were some beautiful moments, though. The servant who fights Cornwall in Act III, scene vii made no noise after his onstage death. But just as Frannie was about the make a note to tell him to make some sort of “death sound,” a guy sitting next to her and watching began to grin and say to himself, “That’s good.” Silent it remained.

And, in a brilliant, emotional touch to the final scene, Edgar brought Gloucester’s bloody blindfold with him when he entered. After the fight, as the brothers reconcile and he is recounting their father’s death, Edgar presented Edmund with the blindfold. Both Edgar’s gesture and Edmund’s reaction were beautiful gut-punches.

The moment was a reminder that, although SIP is not about seeking artistic achievement, our ensemble members often come up with artistically beautiful ideas, the more so for their completely organic origins. Edgar needed no director to come up with that gesture as a poignant marker of loss and connection; it came from the work he has done to understand his character and the play.

As we put up the ring, the frustration seemed to dissipate a bit. The next time we gather, it will be to perform for an audience!

Season Two: Week 40

“We don’t make friends. We make family.”

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Tuesday / March 26 / 2019
Written by Matt

We made it to Week 40, y’all! Longtime readers of the blog will know what that means… very little to write about! During performances and dress rehearsals, facilitators become full members of the cast and crew--we’re just trying to hold it all together like everybody else.

As usual, we got thrown a curveball in the home stretch (which is a terribly mixed baseball metaphor, but let’s move on from that). Our Cordelia had to leave the ensemble at the last minute. Not only is this sort of last-minute chaos completely par for the course (because, suddenly, we’re playing golf), but the role that opens up also always seems to be the one best suited to be filled by Frannie, no matter how deep our bench is (sportball!). It’s happened all but two years with the women, and here at Parnall, Frannie’s had to step in at the last second to take on Desdemona (in Othello) and Miranda (in The Tempest). So it is only fitting that, of all roles to open up, the one that presented itself was Cordelia.

Partly as a practical measure and partly as a challenge to the guys who are still using scripts, Frannie arrived off-book for her role. And, to be honest, having facilitators onstage always gives our ensemble members a boost of energy. So it was today… maybe too much energy! In her re-appearance scene in Act IV, Cordelia interacts with soldiers, a gentleman, and a messenger. But her command to search for her father was apparently so convincing that everybody exited together, leaving Frannie alone onstage. She turned her dialogue into an impromptu soliloquy (I think it went something like, “Um… Alack, dear father… There’s a war! The scene’s over!”).

Despite the chaos--and especially for a first dress rehearsal--today’s run went remarkably well. The guys are good at rolling with the punches. We all need to get better with our lines, but we’ve got a really solid group this season.

Friday / March 29 / 2019
Written by Coffey

We had another great run of the show today, but this time with a special guest! Detroit Public Theatre’s own Sarah Clare Corporandy was our audience and, with new eyes on the stage, the men stepped up their game. We shaved 15 minutes off of the overall run time, scene changes got smoother, there was no noise coming from backstage, and the men were prompt and clear when calling for line. Technical improvements aside, the men were clearly settling into the world of the play and began making space in that world for their characters. It was beautiful to watch the actors, for the most part, lose concern for where they would exit next and give in to the power of the play. I was on book for them and my eyes were repeatedly drawn away from the script and onto the stage. The play has more life in it with every run, and that life carried the play past the occasional missed entrance and forgotten line. In the words of one of our actors, “When we were bad, we were good. When we were good, we were great!”

Season Two: Week 39

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

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Tuesday / March 19 / 2019
Written by Matt

This is the part of the season where blog posts start to get short! Our plan today was to start at the top of the show at one o’clock and run as much of it as we could. We were slightly delayed getting started, but we mostly stuck to the plan: we began Act I scene i at 1:09 p.m.

Right away, things got muddled. The first scene is both complicated and extremely important to understanding the play’s themes and relationships. In the chapel (as opposed to the gym, which is our actual performance space), Lear’s entrance with his family and court caused an epic traffic jam that slowed us down from the start. There were some lovely moments (Kent’s “banishment is here” earned a note of “mic drop” from Frannie), but it still took us more than fifteen minutes to run through that scene.

Part of the issue was perennial: lines. Many of the guys have cue cards now, which are less obtrusive than scripts but are forever getting shuffled or dropped and put back out of order. The few guys who have committed their lines to memory still stumble over them a bit, miss cues, and stand for precious moments struggling to recall them. This is a common enough occurrence in any nonprofessional theatre, and it’s always an issue in SIP, but none of the guys has had the experience of simply forging ahead in spite of mishaps, keeping the show going instead of stopping to make it perfect. With the women, we have always had at least a couple of people who can carry their experience of performance over to the next year. It’s really a different approach to the whole endeavor as the ensemble sacrifices everything on the altar of telling the story. And maybe it’s because this group of guys is so brilliant and rigorous and dedicated that they struggle to switch into a new paradigm--one in which the important thing is letting go.

In any case, the run sped up. The scenes that we knew would be a mess were a mess--Act I scene iv, in particular, was confused and jumbled, in part because we had cast the non-speaking knights before our new members arrived on Friday, so that scene stretches us thin. But once we got to Act II, we were rolling. The scenes were taking only a few minutes each, even the long ones, which is a good sign. We got up through Act V scene i before we had to call it quits; it had been almost exactly two hours. The guys seemed a little bit deflated by not being able to finish the run, but we tried to assure them that two hours (well, it would have taken us another fifteen minutes if we had finished the play, but still!) was a really good length at this stage in the process. As we put up the ring, everyone was excited for the arrival of the costumes and props on Friday… facilitators included!

Friday / March 22 / 2019
Written by Coffey

Today was our first day working with costumes and props. Regan and Goneril, with their matching black dresses and black, lacey fans, looked fierce (in every sense) and immediately matched their outfits with sharper, more severe posture and movement. Lear looked “every inch a king” in his long robe and crown. Once the costume was on, his shoulders were pulled back and his head was high and level. It was unexpectedly emotional to see the men seeing themselves in their costumes. One man put on a suit that happened to fit perfectly, and he stood in silence for a few moments, staring at himself as if he couldn’t believe what he saw. Today was a striking reminder of how powerful costumes can be and how easily a change of clothing can make you feel like a different person.

After the magic of trying on costumes for the first time, we got to the nitty gritty of a cue-to-cue. As is usual with any production, the cue-to-cue process was long and frustrating at times, but seeing the men in their costumes in front of the finished backdrops was exciting. The show is coming together, and the hard work is starting to pay off.

Season Two: Week 38

Would not a pair of these (coins) breed?

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Tuesday / March 12 / 2019
Written by Matt

Check-in took a while today, mostly because of a conversation about the attendance policy that I won’t bore you with. A veteran had to give up his role because of work conflicts, so we needed a new Oswald again. At this point in the season, we explained, it’s usually just easier to plug facilitators in when roles open up--and everyone turned to look at Maria. “You’d make a great Oswald,” one said.

What they didn’t notice as they were all getting used to Maria as Oswald was the ensemble member with his hand in the air. “I’ll play Oswald,” he said. It took a second to recalibrate before everyone congratulated him on volunteering for the role. He had wanted to only play small roles before, and here he was, putting himself in to take on a big role, including three fights! It’s often these last-minute casting changes that bring out ensemble members’ inner heroics; so many times, it is the ones who have hung back or counted themselves out who end up diving into big roles in the final weeks of the process.

With the time and people we had left, it made sense to work through our new Oswald’s scenes for the rest of the session, to get him acquainted with the blocking and the fights. And, man… did he ever throw himself in! He quickly learned the blocking for his scenes, and ran over and over the fights, which involved staggering and falling to the floor multiple times. Our Lear and Kent walked him through the fights, coaching him on how to take a “slap” and where to fall.

Our Oswald, who is older than the other ensemble members, has been sticking up for “old men” like Lear and Gloucester throughout the season, telling us not to see them as weak or frail. In some way, this man’s willingness to do these physically demanding stage-fighting moves over and over seemed like a pointed demonstration of what he’s been saying all season: don’t underestimate the old guy!

Friday / March 15 / 2019
Written by Coffey

“Thanks for letting me back in, y’all. I’m all the way in.”

Today we had five new and returning ensemble members join us. Some were encouraged to come by current members, others have been keeping an eye on us and wanting to take part for a while. Regardless of what brought them to the gym today, they all seemed excited to be there. “Thank you for letting me try,” one of the new members said. They were greeted warmly by the rest of the ensemble, who were excited to have more hands on deck for our final weeks of rehearsal. “You are gonna be a big help to us!” one man said.

While the new and returning members had an orientation with Frannie and a couple others, the rest of us started working on Act 3, scenes ii and iv. Scenes in which one man is completely delusional, another is pretending to be, one man is cracking jokes constantly, and one is just trying to get them all inside and out of the rain are not easy to make cohesive. Our Lear and Fool prepared for the chaos by jumping up and down and shaking their arms out together right before going onstage. For the first few tries, the men were all in their own different worlds. The scene felt like three different scenes happening on the same stage. This led to Kent accidentally pulling his sword on Gloucester in a moment of distraction and quickly apologizing (“Sorry—didn’t mean to pull that on you, buddy!”) and Gloucester setting Lear on fire with his imaginary torch. With each run of the scene, however, the men became more and more connected until, despite their characters’ varied mental states, they were all occupying the same space. Matt at one point tapped my shoulder and pointed downstage right whispering, “Look at that...” I looked up to see Lear, crouched and hovering over Edgar, sheltering him with his own body and whispering to him as though he were comforting a frightened child—these two isolated characters finally finding refuge in each other.

The men carried that synergy into Act 3, scene vi, though our Lear was trying to feel out just how detached from reality he would be at this point in the play.

“Am I joyful? Happy?” he asked.

“It’s up to you—you’re crazy!” Kent replied.

The shared energy between the actors may have been carried a little bit too far, as our Kent matched Lear’s crazy by uncharacteristically slamming his hands on a table and shouting his “Where is the patience now,/ that thou so oft have boasted to retain?” into Lear’s face.

The scene immediately stopped as some of us laughed at the unexpected outburst from a usually cool Kent (including Kent himself). “Well, Kent has forced us to start the scene again due to his complete lack of compassion,” Frannie laughed.

We looped back around to Act 2, scene iv, and the improvement I saw since we last ran this scene was incredible. Cue pickup was snappy, and the men were completely plugged in to each other and the scene. As Regan and Cornwall placed Kent in the stocks, their power as a unit made me fear for anyone who would stand in their way as the play went on.

Albany was sitting next to me and watching the scene. “Why is Albany not in this scene?” he asked himself, noticing that Goneril entered the scene without him. “He probably doesn’t even know Goneril is there,” I replied. “She didn’t even leave a note,” he mused, staring into the distance. It’s good to see that the character relationship dynamic is continuing to develop.

For most of the time in which we were doing scene work, I could hear one of our returning members excitedly giving the context to the newer members and explaining to them what he felt made the scenes so beautiful. His eyes rarely left the stage, and he even changed seats every few minutes to get a different view of the action. As the rehearsal came to a close, nearly every new member asked for a copy of the play so they could start studying as soon as possible.

Season Two: Week 37

Put but money in (our) purse.

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Tuesday / March 5 / 2019
Written by Emma

A harbinger of spring (hopefully), the men were in a rather sunny mood. Our agenda included two important items of business: we needed to select a play for next season, as well as run through as much of the show as possible without stopping.

The selection of next year’s play was a collaborative process—a hallmark of SIP. After some preliminary discourse, the ensemble seemed to have narrowed down the choices to a tragedy, Julius Caesar, and a comedy, As You Like It. The men thoughtfully weighed the pros and cons of each of these options. “It keeps up the energy of the troupe to do comedy,” one veteran member stated in favor of As You Like It. “But,” another member chimed in, “for a men’s compound, a lot of people would want to see Julius Caesar.” After a few more minutes of Comedy vs. Tragedy deliberation, one man posed the question: “What’s the difference between comedies and tragedies? If you’re doing a great play, what’s the difference?” Building on this thought, another member added, “From a personal perspective as an artist, if people like my work, they’ll come back and see it regardless.” When all had spoken their piece, the decision was left up to a vote. Final tallies found As You Like It in the lead, making it the official play for the men’s ensemble’s 2019-20 season!

With next season’s fate decided, we moved on to the first run through (well, run-as-much-as-we-can-through) of Lear. Within the first few lines of dialogue, the massive amounts of work that the ensemble had done in my absence was evident. For the next hour and a half, I sat captivated.

I was asked to take notes on areas that I felt could use improvement and/or clarification. Upon reviewing what I had written, it would appear that my comments were actually overwhelmingly laudatory. Since my last observation, each and every character had grown in depth and complexity. Our Goneril and Regan, who, during my last visit, were dipping their toes into villainy, had come alive with a cool venom as they rained false praise on Lear in Act I, Scene 1. In the same scene, our Lear demonstrated an impressive range of emotion that wasn’t there a few weeks ago. During the banishment of Kent, Lear deftly entwined anger and sorrow, landing in quiet desperation on the line, “Kent, on thy life, no more.” Aaaand, cue the goosebumps!

Other highlights of the run-through include: Gloucester’s slow emotional and physical transition from esteemed nobleman to haggard outcast, the way Edmund was able to convey manipulativeness while still soliciting sympathy, and Edgar’s fearless dive into his Poor Tom persona, which included covering his face in his long hair and adopting a slight accent. Our Fool, who is new to the role, proved himself to be a natural. He carried himself from scene to scene with a slightly hunched back, his hands held to his chest, in a way that felt very Wormtongue from The Lord of The Rings. However, unlike Wormtongue, our fool maintained a very subtle air of levity as he delivered his lines—perfect, coming from a Fool in the midst of a tragedy. The overall impact was, according to my notes, “on point.”

After stopping only a handful of times to fix urgent hiccups, we concluded the run-through (about ⅔ of the way through the play) with a few minutes left and briefly discussed how it felt: what worked, what didn’t, and thoughts for moving forward.

Friday / March 8 / 2019
Written by Coffey

With the 90-minute time limit on everyone’s mind, most of our check-in was devoted to how we’re planning to make cuts to the script, a process that proved to be a delicate and involved one to some of the men. “I’m very sensitive about cutting my scenes,” our Lear said, “ ‘cuz I’ve gone through the Arden several times trying to cut my lines.” To others, the process was solely in the interest of time: “It wasn’t really about certain lines,” our Albany said, “There’s a certain value to everyone’s lines.” Regardless of which lines the men chose to cut, one man advised that everyone “get with the person you’re in a scene with and let them know if the cues have changed.”

Matt suggested that, in addition to cutting unnecessary lines, the men could start trying to bring more of a sense of urgency with them on stage. This would help transitions between scenes to speed up, cues to be picked up more readily, and the overall time of our run-throughs to shorten. Another man added that offstage distractions have been cutting into our time: “Side distractions are frustrating. Critique-wise, I think everyone is doing an awesome job. We got 75% of the play done in an hour and a half. Let’s focus on getting that last 25% and help each other out.”

Ending check-in on that encouraging note, we decided to warm up by playing a game of “Wah”. We stood in a circle, loudly wah-ing at each other and striking coordinated poses until someone missed their cue and was eliminated. This went on until we had two players left standing (Matt being one of them).

We began our rehearsal where we left off, going from Edgar and Gloucester’s reunion in Act IV, scene 1, to the play’s finale. The run had its setbacks. Entrances were still pretty chunky, the minor roles, as well as Edmund and Oswald (who were absent), were taken on by whoever had a free moment, and everyone was still a bit shaky on the blocking—pretty normal setbacks for a run at this point in the season. The men are beginning the hard process of moving their focus from character building and scene work to the show as a whole. As they continued that transition today, it gave us an opportunity to see how strong their characterization and in-scene work has become. Gloucester, after being horribly abused by Regan and Cornwall, wasn’t wilting or muted about his hopelessness and lost faith in the world, but enraged by it. “O you mighty gods! This world I do renounce, and, in your sights,/ Shake patiently my great affliction off,” was not a plea, but a loud declaration punctuated with his balled fists—something I’ve never scene a Gloucester do.

Gloucester wasn’t the only one showing a surprising streak of anger. Cordelia, when we circled back to rehearse Act I, scene 1, responded to Lear’s vitriolic, “Better thou / Hadst not been born than not to have pleased me better,” by charging Lear, threatening to push him. I read just as much hurt in this action as I would have if Cordelia shrank back and burst into tears. A moment of laughter came during I.i as well, when Gloucester entered in the middle of Lear and Cordelia’s confrontation and sat down very slowly, unsure if he was intruding, and deeply uncomfortable. Amidst the chaos of trying to go straight through the show, these strong, unique choices were energizing and carried the men through. Even Goneril, who is typically reserved onstage, let loose during the final scene, his look of terror fully convincing me that Goneril’s world was falling apart.

We finished the play with a runtime of 2 ½ hours - not bad at all for an early run through! Wrinkles still remain as they would in any show, but a note from Emma really sums up the feeling with which we all left the gym: “However weary, anxious, or frustrated you may be feeling at this point in the season, you’re doing spectacular work, and it shows.”