Rehearsal #8: Keep it Going

As we get deeper and deeper into a show, especially a show that’s going fairly well, there becomes less and less to work on in rehearsal. They become more or less an opportunity to connect and keep everyone on the same page. That’s mostly what we did this week. We worked on some games (Oompa Loompa Comentary, Genre Combo, Genre Slide, Genre Roller Coaster, State Trooper) and ended early. It was also St. Patrick’s Day, and I didn’t want to keep people too late in case they had plans or just wanted to beat the drunken traffic home.

The show runs for two more weekends, but this is actually my last. I’m directing Impact Briefs: Puberty which opens in May and needs to start rehearsals ASAP. All that is to say, I likely will not blog about next week’s rehearsal as I won’t be there.

Load-In

We had load-in last night for the show. Although, as Mandy said, we didn’t load in so much as clean up. The previous tenants in the space left it a bit of a mess. I don’t really understand why groups do that. People are slobs.

In any case, we cleaned up, set up the cyc and the legs, arranged the lights. I figured out how to arrange the box office in a suitably aesthetically and functionally pleasing way. Clay and Joy made the concessions cart look pretty. Christian and Dave arranged the concessions and t-shirts. We were out of there by 9:30. Of course that makes it seem like a short load-in. Clay and Mandy started at 3:00 with the rest of us showing up closer to 6:00.

Watch all 6+ hours of it in time-lapse!

Rehearsal #5: Birthday Rapping

We had David Norfleet at rehearsal last night so we could practice singing. After suitably warming up, we started by improvising some songs in the style of the Andrew’s Sisters. We do this by having one person stand in the middle with two other facing them. The middle singer sings a song, while the two on either side do their best to harmonize with the singer while singing the same words. It helps if they look directly at the singers mouth and learn to lip-read from profile.

Then we went over Mandy’s Barber Shop Quartet concept from last week. With some help from Mr. Norfleet, we were able to get this down into a fairly doable state. This basically involves a lead singer singing a song in 4 measure chunks, with the backup quartet repeating each line in harmony.

At this point, we took a break and had some lovely birthday cake in honor of Clay’s and Dave’s birthdays, both this week. Fully charged with our sugar rush, we moved into some point-of-view songs and scenes into songs before capping the evening off with me pimping people to sing songs I wanted to see them sing. Highlights included Scott & Jeff’s Beastie Boys style rap. Dave’s rap with Christian providing a “sample” chorus while Trish danced. And the Spring Break gang butt rape reunion song. Don’t ask.

Rehearsal #3 in Time-Lapse
Rehearsal #4 in Time-Lapse

And last night’s rehearsal:


You’ll notice the green background. We have a “Green Screen Challenge” going on right now for an as yet undetermined prize.

Rehearsal #2: Dynamics

Rehearsal number TWO! Ah… it felt like slipping into a nice comfortable pair of shoes. Now I remember what directing feels like.

We were at the Dark Room, and we started (after suitable name-game warm-ups) with just practicing setting up scenes in character. In order to get over the initial inertia, I told people to start by setting up scenes and games while in Shakespearean characters. Then, once people had the hang of it and the creative juices started to flow, we expanded into more free-form styles.

Then we took a short break and moved into trying to establish a scene in a genre as quickly as possible without telling anyone which genre you were trying to establish. This exercise has the added bonus of developing style-matching skills without people really being aware of it. Shh… Don’t tell them.

THEN we did a status exercise that Tara developed at the Un-Scripted retreat a few years ago using a card game called Blink. The game has cards with various designs, but the key is that the design is repeated anywhere from 1 to 5 times. So it’s like having a whole deck of cards just 1 through 5.

Here’s how it works. Everyone in the scene pulls cards that represent their statuses to various elements of the scene. A card for their status to themselves, to each other character in the scene, and to the environment. Then you set people up in a scene. Setting people up in a scene is rather important for this exercise because the set up will imply certain status relationships that will either be in line with or opposite of the status cards they chose. The results are always very dynamic scenes.

Watch it all time-lapsed down to less than two minutes:

Rehearsal #1: Knocking Off the Rust

Boy am I rusty! I haven’t directed anything since The Short and the Long of It in 2005, almost 4 years ago. That’s hard to believe given that at one time directing was what I wanted to do, as a career. Of course I wanted to direct scripted plays, because, you know, that’s where the money is.

My directing muscles have all atrophied. I need to do some serious work to get them back up to speed. Fortunately Christian and Mandy were both at rehearsal last night to pick up the slack when I lost all ability to articulate. Of course it didn’t help matters much that I was in the midst of a full on seasonal allergy attack coupled with the fact that we were rehearsing at Stage Werx, a wonderful space mind you, but one that I appear to be allergic to regardless of the season. All this is to say that I was stuffed up, exhausted, and generally spacey. Not good things to be when dusting off the directorial parts of one’s brain after a long period of disuse.

Under the circumstances, I think I did remarkably well. To begin with, I have a great cast. Not only do I have a full 6 ensemble members in the show, but Scott, Trish, and Jeff are all Un-Scripted veterans, and Joy, the newcomer in the cast, did improv with Clay back in Boston. So already there’s chemistry there.

I wanted to ease into things for our first rehearsal, so we started with my favorite name game and then moved into scene work. I had everyone set up a game they wanted to play or see played. Then I had everyone set up a scene in a genre they wanted to see. By the time we finished with that it was already 9:30 and my brain had officially started shutting down for the evening. We finished off with a rousing round of The Dukes of Hazard game that Jeff taught us during Bollywood.

All-in-all a solid start. Now I just need to figure out what we’re doing for the rest of the rehearsals.

You can watch last night’s rehearsal in its entirety shrunk down to 2 minutes through the glories of time lapse photography, our new favorite toy:

Bollywood Clips

Clay has been busy posting video clips to Un-Scripted's YouTube Channel. Like this one, where part of the set comes crashing down at the end.



Or this opening number from the show on 12/6:

Week 1: Show Summaries

Here's a sneak peek at last weekend's show summaries that will go out in tomorrow's email. We had a great weekend with packed houses. Make sure to buy your tickets early as we had to turn people away on Saturday night.

Friday: Naroosh’s Plum or Ambition!
Veeru (Bryce) returns home from the city to work for his family’s dung delivery service only to find he delivers more than just fertilizer to the fair Sarasvati (Jenny). He also delivers his heart. Can his ambition to win her hand be stopped? All he has to do is find the Plum of Naroosh... which probably doesn't even exit.

Ambition! - Sung by Bryce


Saturday Matinee: Love Train or Revenge Is Sweet!
Bashir (Pepper) and Rajul (Christian)have both fallen in love with Anita (Mandy) and pretend to be baggage handlers on a train to Bombay in order to be close to her as her family moves away from their village. When Bashir wins Anita’s affections, Rajul’s revenge takes a wrong turn, but that’s nothing a wedding on top of a moving train can’t fix!

Everything is New - Sung by Christian, Pepper, & Mandy


Saturday Evening: Raj’s Café or Everybody's Friend
Anuvab (Clay) just wants everybody to like him, but as a result he’s running his café into the ground. When his parents kick him out of the house, he’s forced to make the café profitable and becomes a tyrannical boss. Is the cost of success more than he’s willing to pay?

Everybody Likes! - Sung by Christian and Clay

Rehearsal #11: Group Mind and Dance

We had rehearsal Wednesday night at the movement studio space at ACT. If you haven’t rehearsed at ACT in a while, they’ve completely re-done the 8th floor. It’s very disorienting if you’re used to the old lay-out.

We started by working on group mind characters. That’s when a group of characters (a group being as small as 2) share a group mind. They may not say exactly the same thing or even have exactly the same personalities, but they are essentially the same character. They have the same opinions and reactions. When you have a lot of characters on stage at the same time, it’s generally useful to gravitate into group minds. It generally keeps scenes from devolving into chaos as everyone tries to get in their ideas. Group minds can also be very fluid. One moment you might be in a group mind with characters A and B and then be an individual in the next moment. As with anything, there are no hard and fast rules.

But it’s a useful skill, recognizing when group mind characters are needed and knowing how to do them.

They often take the form of Character A and their group of followers who are all of a group mind. That’s what we practiced as it’s fairly common in Bollywood (and most stories really); you see Male love interest and his friends (of group mind) and Female love interest and her friends (of group mind).

For some reason, whenever we work on group mind characters, I feel compelled to mention that we at Un-Scripted first started working on group mind when founding member Brian McBride noticed that the cheerleader in Better Off Dead dates the entire basketball team and how the basketball team functions as one character.

But that’s not all we did. As we were in the movement studio, we also worked a lot on dancing. We would start a scene and then Mandy would play a Bollywood song off a CD (as we were sans musician) and we’d dance to it. Because we weren’t also trying to invent lyrics to the song as we went, we found we did much more interesting and fun dance numbers this way.

That got us to thinking, that generally when a song moment hits, we sing and maybe fit some dance in if we can. For this show, we need to think of them as music moments, not song moments, and remember that we can also just start dancing and throw some singing in if we can.