winter/ montevideo/ otono/ sonrisa

It's the day of the estreno, the opening night.
I've just written to the author, sending him photos and telling him his play is a "joya".
I don't know Mr Fosse and in all likelihood will never meet him, but someone put me in touch with him and over the course of the months we have exchanged a few words.
The relationship of a director with a living playwright is a strange one.
When I ran into Simon Stephens, last June, in a kind of Montevidean London moment, he said that he felt as though he'd been living inside my head for weeks. I'd been sending him weekly accounts of the rehearsal process.
I replied that I was the one living inside his head.
And it's true. A director does feel immersed in the mind of the play's writer, if they're doing their job. Exploring the nooks and crannies which the play, which is but a fragment of the writer's mind, a nook or a cranny of its own, reveals.
As a result, although I have never met him and in all probability never will, I am inordinately fond of Mr Fosse. From what I can deduce, and indeed he may have altered since the moment, the days, in which he wrote Winter, he has a sideways grasp of life which observes and indulges the tragedies and their ironies, which all our small lives consist of.
For this is the reason we go to drama. To see our own lives reflected in the lives of others.
Last night there was a young woman in the audience for the dress rehearsal. I suspected she was not an actress or a theatre person. She was in the row ahead of me. Although the dress took its time to warm up, Natalia and Carlos got into the swing of things from the middle of Act 2 onwards. I watched her as she started to smile. The smile stayed through the rest of the play. I think, (I may be wrong), that it was a smile of recognition. At the end she came up to me and told me how much she enjoyed it.
If there is a better detailer of the small and childish gods which we are, each and every one of us, writing today, I have yet to come across them.
It is Fosse's capacity to marry the sublime with the ridiculous which makes him special.
And has made Winter such a pleasure to have worked on, these past six months.

invierno/ circular/ otono/ ensayo/ agua

It's the last week of rehearsals before we open on Friday. Life has been a blizzard of theatre, running from one play to another.

Invierno, or Winter, is almost ready. At last performance/ audience beckons.

At which point the director notes something of interest. The limits of rehearsals. There is only so far the actor can go in rehearsal. They can be word-perfect, intention-perfect, clean as a whistle, but without an audience they are now treading water.

This is above all the case for those moments in the play which are dependent on performance. Those where the actor is requested to take the greatest risk, to be the most ridiculous, or dangerous, or absurd. These moments depend on an audience reaction. When the actor pushes him or herself to the limit, they don't know if they're going over the top. Whether the scene really convinces. Without an audience they can never find out, hence there's less impulse to push to achieve these more problematic moments in rehearsal. Where the director is the only judge.

There's one moment in Act 4 of Winter which demands a significant gesture. One that threatens to push the play beyond the boundaries of taste, towards melodrama or kitsch. It's something we have adjusted, searching for our own way of realising the author's intentions.

Does our chosen action succeed or not? Until we get to Friday, we have no way of knowing. Meanwhile, we continue to aim towards technical perfection, knowing that we are now marking time, awaiting the arrival of the others, los de mas. 

winter/ montevideo/ otono/ vomito

This phase of rehearsals is a curious one. The actors, essentially, know what they are doing. The thing they lack is confidence. The process of acquiring confidence has various grades. These include:

• Being confident that you have a basic understanding of why you are where you are on stage and what you're supposed to be doing there.
• Being confident in the lines.
• Being confident in the capacity to move towards what we might call "performance" levels of intensity.
• Being confident in front of an audience.

There may be others.

The first is something which is unlikely to ever be entirely resolved. A play is a series of moments, and there's always the possibility that an occasional moment has slipped the director's grasp (or even slipped the writer's grasp in the writing of it.) However, this is the bulk work of rehearsals and two weeks before the opening of a conventional stage play you would hope the production is on a firm footing with regard to this.

The second is obviously more dependent on the actors. However, it should be noted that when actors have problems with particular lines, it often represents a moment when there's still a slight lack of clarity with regard to the former point. Fosse's text is particularly dense. It's complexity makes the lines harder to learn than a more conventional drama. The process of really being on top of the lines goes hand in glove with being completely sure about where the actor 'is' on stage (not necessarily meant in a physical sense, more a metaphysical one.) Yesterday, perhaps for the first time, we finally crossed this bridge, both actors being 95% fluent with the lines and, more importantly, feeling confident that they really 'know' them.

The third point is contingent on the second. Whilst the actor is worrying about whether or not the lines are going to come out right, it's hard to really let go and surf the dialogue. Some of the best dialogue, the most dramatic, or impassioned, requires just that. It's hard to act losing your temper if you're worrying about the lines. It's hard to act losing your temper if you can't really throw yourself at it. We're at this stage now, where the actors are on the point of being able to move up through the gears, express emotion more freely, which in turn allows them to play with the colours and gradients of the dialogue, the way in which it rises towards a climax and then subsides. The musicality of Fosse's text, mentioned before, makes this phase particularly important. Without the capacity to let go, it runs the risk of feeling wooden. Charm alone can't make it work. It has to be lived, in so far as this is possible. I think we're getting there.

The final point has an obvious condition: the presence of an audience. A play isn't really alive until the audience receives it. And it's impossible to judge to what extent the play is 'working' without this audience. Which is not to say the audience necessarily has to love it. But until the actors have experienced it with the presence of an audience, the final building blocks of confidence in the work cannot be cemented.

As mentioned, we're getting there. And the key aspect of all this is to ensure that the play arrives on opening night neither underdone nor overcooked. Next Friday all shall be revealed.

winter/ montevideo/ otono/ ventana

This project began back in September, which means it  has been six months in the gestation.  Finally, we have a date and a theatre. We open in two weeks in Sala Dos of the Circular. This will be transnoche, as they call it. A 23.30 kick-off. But if ever there was a play which fits the transnoche bill, then this must be it. 

On Friday we had one of our last rehearsals in the dance studio. Natalia wanted to do some more work on Scene 4. Scene 4 is short and sharp. it requires less work than the other three scenes and has received less work as a result. There is a moment when, exasperated , she walks across the room.  During the work with Marga and the work up to now with Natalia this ‘room’ has always been as vague as can be. A theatrical space, which can be realised at any time in any given auditorium. But all of a sudden, the scene was demanding more form.  When she walks across the room, she’s searching for something, a point of reference, a breathing space. Before returning to the attack.

And so it came about that after six months of working in a hotel room with a bed, a door and nothing else, we discovered it also has a window and a view. 

winter/ montevideo/ otono/ llamadas

In act 3 the man has his longest speech in the play. He recounts the events that surround his failure to attend the meeting he was due to go to at the start of the play. In his account, he describes the phone conversations that have taken place, between himself, his boss and the man he was supposed to meet. So far so simple. But the more you work on the speech, the more complex it becomes. There's calls within calls. Calls about calls. Missed calls. And lies about calls. And lies within calls. It's a beautiful piece of writing, but it sums up the twisted nature of the writer's mind. Twisted in the sense of convoluted, complex, opaque. It's almost beyond the realm of auditory understanding. I also suspect I have let it slip through my fingers a little: one of the problems of directing in a second language is that you possess a less immediate relationship to the words and there is a risk you let them wash over you as you focus on the relationships which occur above and beyond text (the true heart of drama, I might argue.) The other aspect of this complexity is that it highlights the beauty/ brilliance of Fosse's text: the dialectic between the exceedingly complex and the moments that cut through this complexity with the simplicity of dawn.

winter - ensayos, otono, montevideo

We enter the final phase of rehearsals of Winter.

We are rehearsing upstairs in a Dance studio. Our rehearsal schedule is conditioned by the ballet dancers below. When they are there the piano music seeps through the ceiling, making pretty havoc with our concentration.

Acts 1&2 are more or less ready. The actors start to feel comfortable within their curious rhythms. Finding the moments which the text never indicated where the sequence of curt words are actually flaring up, or merely marking time, until the next twist of thought, instinct, unlikely action.

Acts 3&4 have all the shape but are still in the process of finding their body. But they are nearly there. And then it will be runs and runs and runs. There's no room to slack off with Fosse. Everything has to have the requisite degree of truthfulness and theatrical. The play is like a big cat. It can come over all cuddly but if you leave it alone for too long it will turn around and bite your hand off. 

a summer's day in el galpon

An approach by the Galpon to do some workshops with their actors lead to four talleres on A Summer's Day.

The objective here was to look at the way in which Fosse's poetics operate. We used the long speech at the end of Act 2, where the woman looks back on the moment she and her friend's realised her husband wasn't coming back.

The events are all conveyed in reported speech, something that is almost anathema to contemporary ideas of drama, predicated by the demands of TV and film. The action of a human seen to be reflecting is generally considered to be dangerously passive (a word that is generally used in a pejorative sense in the script world I inhabit - ie - 'the lead character is overly passive'). At the same time, drama, from the Greeks onwards and presumably beforehand has always used the act of reporting events rather than showing them, something that goes against the modern mantra of "Show don't tell." Try telling Euripides. Or Shakespeare. Or Fosse.

A Summer's Day is a text which is very aware of the terrible power of that which is seen through the mind's eye. The Old Lady relives the day her life changed. Fosse employs the curious device of presenting her younger self and three other younger characters who interact with the 'present' of the old lady now, more serene, seemingly at ease with herself with the events described having occured decades ago. As such, this play is a meditation on time, as well as loss.

The exercises we used worked on 'presenting' the action which the old woman is recounting. The objective was not to discover a potential staging, but to find ways for the actors to get a foothold on the text, to "see" what they were telling. This is very much a rehearsal device; I doubt it would function in performance. Nevertheless it allowed the actors to access the large speech, and to connect with the emotion and drama which lurks within it. Ultimately these things have to emerge, to be conveyed, through the voice, and we were working towards this aim, with the actress reacting to the events as she saw them, and her voice thereby engaging with the complexity of the situation. In the end, it's clear that the lines she speaks are full of the storm and the anxiety and the fear of loss. Yet the trick is not to impose these things on the text, but to allow the words themselves to reveal the actress' emotions.

In the last workshop, we used the same technique, or 'presenting' the text, for Shakespeare's famous Seven Ages of Man speech, one which none of the actors knew.