first stumble-thru

The whole show is staged.

On Thursday night, we ran through the entire play. With the break at intermission, it took about two hours. Right on target.

A run-through at this point in the process gives everyone a chance to review the work we've done so far, and to get a sense of their arc through the play as a whole. We've asked the actors to have their lines memorized by tomorrow, and this upcoming week will be off-book rehearsals of each scene — a chance to finally delve into the meat of the acting without the scripts in the way.

For me, the run-through was a chance to see the staging that I've done so far and to determine what is working and what is not. There are several simple things to fix — Hamlet sits in the same place in the same type of moment in three scenes in a row, for example, and too many of his soliloquies happen way over on stage left. There are also more complicated issues, like finding a point late in the play to pay off the stylized staging I use in the opening.

I took about three pages of notes. Most are simple staging ideas that I'll work into rehearsals this week ("H come off L platform sooner b4 end 1st sol.", or "Hor counter UR when H is DR w/Players"). Some are about which actors need to work on projecting their voice a little better. Some are acting notes, and at this point in the process these tend to be simple and fairly general — "Osr: love of language as way to hide contempt for H — too naked right now" or "Lae: clear beat change into bringing up H". Some notes are about tone or emotion, and will need to be translated into more useful actor language before I bring them up in rehearsal (actors playing tone and emotion instead of actions and objectives tend to make less interesting and less specific choices, so it's important for the director not to tell an actor to "be more sad" or "be more noble" or whatever). Some are picky language things, usually very specific words that we've already covered in tabletalk or in staging rehearsals but that the actor didn't quite nail in the run-thru — and usually the actor is also aware that they missed it (things like the pronunciation of "importuned," or that "it" in "virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it" refers to "old stock" and that the actor needs to help the audience follow this).

Several notes are just about what scenes need to be given extra time to work in the schedule for the upcoming week, sometimes for acting and sometimes for staging — these I mark with a little star so that I can find them quickly later on when planning the schedule with the stage manager. And some notes I put in big parentheses; these are things that I need to think about when I have some time to myself ("[Q death needs more of a moment]", "[k/q entrance idea not working]").

All in all, I was extremely happy with the run. There were long stretches of three or four scenes in a row that just played. The fundamental choices all seem to be working. There's a tremendous amount of work ahead, but we seem to be on the right path and morale is high. I'm so excited for this upcoming week — at last, a chance for the actors to make eye contact and really start pursuing their objectives.  We'll have another week after that for run-thrus and more scenework, and then Comedy of Errors goes into tech and we can only work with Hamlet, Laertes, and Polonius (who aren't cast in the other show).  After that, we have three rehearsals and then we open.