Welcome to DIRECTOR’S NOTES:
This will be a regular (but not a daily) blog like thing, in which you will get to look inside the head of a director as he moves a cast towards production, in this case Art Center Theater’s production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, opening July 22nd and running through the 31st.
It begins with choosing a play. This is not easy for me. See, I don’t direct a play to entertain, although if I fail at entertaining then everything else fails, too. I direct to make a new statement, something not said before or not readily apparent in the text of the play. I read Our Town so differently from any of the productions I saw. They were unbearably overly sentimental to my taste. So I directed the play I saw in my head, a play filled with conflict, stress under the surface, sparkles of joy and beauty and community, and the heartbreak of loss: in short, a play about the human condition.
I had a similar reaction to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest. The movie was so unlike the book, but then what do you expect from Hollywood? It was just a star vehicle for What’s His Name. But the play by Dale Wasserman was equally frustrating, in a different way. On the plus side it was much more of an ensemble piece. But on the minus side, it left out so much of the power of Ken Kesey’s book. I wanted to put that power back in. So I petitioned Samuel French, the publisher, to add some sections right out of the book.
It is a whole new play now, and much more powerful and universal, I hope.
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It is plenty scary to be a director. You do things to help the actors discover their character, and you just hope they work. And they probably don’t work for some of the actors. Actors onstage have to actually feel emotions inside them, not just pretend to be somebody else. The drive for me when I am acting is to rush off into memorizing my lines. There is an unspoken push to just get up on stage and start blocking the play. As a director, I have to counter that push at first, because actors have to discover where is the place inside their mind and heart where the character and the actor’s own soul and being come together.
So we talk a lot, and I do improvisational exercises, and some folks find out new, and even unexpected things about the way their character reacts to other people and to other situations. I hope it will help them far down the line. But I can’t know for sure.
Powerful theater, whether it is comedy or drama (and Cuckoo’s Nest is a combination of both) requires actors to fight for something important to their character. As an acting teacher I taught, “Every scene is a fight scene!” By that I meant every moment onstage the actor has to want something crucial from another character who is onstage with them. They need a fierce passion to get what they want and need, a strategy to get it, and total commitment to their goal.
Now we are beginning production. We finished the first week of rehearsals. The tendency for most actors is to want to know their lines and their blocking, in hopes of finding their character later on in the process. I reversed that, giving them no lines, no blocking, and just slamming them together in improvised scenarios to find powerful things to want from each other. That strategy is bound to frustrate some of them. But at least they will be happy to get to next weeks blocking rehearsals, and away from all this touchy feely stuff for a little while.
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One insane and underrated part of directing is putting together the schedule. First consideration: when is the stage available, and what are you going to do in the smaller rehearsal space when it isn’t available? Then: who is going to be absent when, and how do you manage rehearsing scenes around their absence? Then: who is in which scene, and how can you lump scenes together in one evening so you can concentrate on smaller groups, and not have people come to an evening of rehearsal in which they are not needed? Wasting actor’s precious time is a very poor move!
Then the harder job. How can you build each rehearsal on the last one, so that the cast doesn’t peak too soon, and start getting bored with the play? And how can you make sure they have enough stage time so that they are confident and ready for opening night? A very imperfect science.
Finally how do you build in space and wiggle room to handle the unexpected (part of the stage not ready because of an Art exhibit--- someone getting ill--- something happening you never dreamt would happen)?
Then comes that terrifying moment when you present the schedule and folks start saying, “Wait, didn’t I tell you I won’t be there on…” How much can you adjust on the fly?
One person, the director, must answer every one of these questions. Every day of rehearsal is opening night for the director.
I just spent three hours listening to electrical sound effects. My ears are still crackling. Ah, the places we go in theater! But very excited.
Lots of folks who will come to the play will have seen the Jack Nicholson film. That is a blessing and a curse. The curse is the audience’s expectations about who they think the characters really are, and what the play is really about. They will want to see how Sam plays the Jack Nicholson part. They are in for a surprise.
The blessing is that, from the moment they step into the theater, they will know that they are in for a very different experience. They are entering into a fascinating bizarre dream world, and everything they thought about the play is about to dissolve.
It is a huge challenge for a director, the actor, the set designer, the lighting designer and the sound mixer to take a classic piece and make it fresh. When it all works, that is what makes live theater so exciting. The trick is to get it all working.
At one point in the casting process of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest it looked like we wouldn’t have enough bodies. I was planning to step in as a minor character. I really did not want to do that! Mercifully folks showed up “out of the woodwork” to pitch in, so I didn’t have to.
When I act I act, and I don’t want to also be the director. And when I direct I have absolutely no interest in being up there on stage doing the show. There is so very many things I have to hold as a director , that it would really be a distraction to be up there on stage.
That said, I know I have a way of working that must be extremely annoying to my actors. Many times I can’t figure out if a piece of blocking is going to work unless I get up there and do it first. For productions I have acted in, there is an invisible line that is rarely crossed, with the director sitting at his or her table on one side of the line, and the actors on stage on the other side of it.
Not me. I am constantly jumping onstage and walking through a cross, or an entrance to see how it feels. If it feels doable to me, then I will ask my actors to find their own way to sell it to the audience.
