Sunday, September 19, 2004

Ahhh... actors

Man, is it nourishing to watch good actors work. Bart and Kate took a lot of time casting this show, and boy can you see it. Our Town is an ensemble piece, but everyone's not on stage all the time. It's more like each person is a color in a painting. They come on -- yellow! -- and are gone. They talk to Doc Gibbs -- turquoise! Actors who are formidable before they walk on... become more interesting during their scene... and carry the play off with them when they go... open the whole piece up. It's like we're in Wyoming. There are great winds blowing through this piece, and each actor is a wind.

Plus Bart is really getting a handle on theatricality. The people are luminous, substantial, yet not rooted to the earth -- they are shimmery icons in space. A scene is a two-person shimmer. Four years ago he couldn't do this. They were icons, but earthbound ones. Pretty great to experience a rehearsal room like this. And there is an ease in the room. He's not tense, we're not tense, everyone's sort of soft and easy. Not touchy-feely soft, but there's-plenty-of-time, we're-ahead-of-schedule, that-looked-good, let's-do-the-next-bit soft.

Eugenio Barba, Joseph Lavy, and Robyn Hunt create this in their rehearsals as well. It must be a hallmark of getting your directing practice down.

Mastery is efficient.

There are a few actors who are more featured in the text; but even their scenes are relatively short. Yet when two excellent actors tangle, four lines seems as rich and subtexty as most people's entire scenes. There are no throwaway lines, and the whole room goes silent. Twenty-six people in the room today, and no one moved during the Drugstore scene.

Tomorrow is our dark day, then back at it on Tuesday.

1 comment:

Tim Norton - The Acting Artist said...

Great post!

I love the show Our Town. I performed the role of Mr. Webb thirteen years ago, in my later highschool years, working alongaside Gabriel Hogan, who was Doc Gibbs. Of all the shows I did in highschool, this one felt the most professional...people took to the subject matter with a seriousness that most highschool actors wouldn't touch if their lives depended on it. The writing is so brilliant that we gave it the respect it deserved.