Rehearsal #10: Good, Bad, & Ugly

Last weekend, Mandy watched an obscene amount of Bollywood movies and remembered several things about Bollywood that she had forgotten. One such nugget of knowledge involved the general tonal convention of Bollywood comedies. The first half focuses on the hilariously comic and funny situations. Then there’s an intermission. Then something horrible happens as a result of the comic antics in the first half, and everyone cries a lot. Then everything works out in the end.

So we practiced that. We did a scene where we focused on hilarious comic situations. Then we did another scene from the later in the story after something had gone horribly wrong involving lots of histrionics and weeping.

Bollywood films have a great deal of embedded melodrama, but in our brief little scenes we discovered we were taking things a bit too far. The point is to play the serious consequences with truth and real emotion. Ok, perhaps the point is to dial them up a notch higher than real, but the truer they are, the richer the emotional journey of the characters and the audience.

We also revisited a disturbing (dare I say “ugly”) fact about working with puppets: Puppets, unlike humans, can die on stage. When an actor lies on the ground and plays dead, even from the back row you can still see them breathing if you look close enough. Or maybe they move slightly. In any case, they are unmistakably alive.

When a puppet, removed from the hand of its puppeteer, is placed on the stage, they look truly dead. Because they are. The can’t get up. They can’t move on their own. They can’t talk. They are dead, in a disturbingly real way.