Building Beowulf: Playwright Rick Chafe’s Rehearsal Journal

16 Days to Opening: Mounting the Horse

Just finished the day’s rewrites. After falling behind yesterday I’m officially back up to date—all the scenes we’ve worked so far have been have received all the nips, tucks, line changes, and order switches that have shown up in working through them these first three days. The first half of the play turns out to be very clean, much less revision required than I would have thought. Tomorrow we run the play up to page 38 or so—very close to having worked up to the halfway point.

Warm, blue sky this morning, and the view… Roxy, who runs the camp program at the Ross Creek Arts Centre loans his house without charge to visiting artists. Its front door is a two minute walk to the beach on the Bay of Fundy. Such a beautiful day. Perfect for horseback riding.

But also for scene rehearsal. We get through five of them. And all deliver up the best kind of surprise—they all played better than I thought I’d written them. These are the times playwrights love actors.

Burgandy took her entrance into scene three, walked up to Jamie and grabbed her by the hair. Suddenly a completely different scene, playing directly against the text as written, and a hundred times better.

Scene six begins with the parents saying goodbye to their sons, untried recruits off to the first war in twenty years. I’d written it as a tender/comic scene where the parents are double-cast as their sons, so that halfway through the scene the parents would turn into their own children. Except casting to cover all the roles in the play made this doubling impossible, so that concept is on the trash heap. Within a few minutes Ken and the actors have tried three different approaches and hit on something that’s both tearful and hilarious. Jeff plays a father too verbally inept to explain how to hold the sword he never expected his son to have to use. It’s so funny you have to laugh. Except it’s so painful you have to cry.

The rest of scene six, Andrea, Chris, Jonny, and Jeff are just plain funny playing the inept recruits despite playing exactly as I’ve written it. I’ll take credit on the assist.

Burgandy and Jeremy take the first run at the scene I’ve been most worried about in the first half of the play—Beowulf sees a ghost. Ken says play with it. Mark, the composer, plays spooky bell sounds, running a violin bow over a set of strange metal rims that look like hubcaps. Burg and Jeremy run the scene five times with five completely different blocking approaches. They all work. I think all of us are surprised.

A break to outdoors in the afternoon to test the evolving technology of the horse puppet. Karen has built the beginnings of a head and a platform to be carried by the selected strong men of the cast, Jonny and Rhys, and made out of two by fours, a cloth saddle, shoulder pads, and two modified backpacks borrowed from a Mermaid Theatre show. Some adjustments for Jonny and Rhys’s differing heights, and the platform works fine. Once Jamie climbs up though, we’re into not ready for primetime territory. Back to Karen’s workshop, we’ll see the next version in the next day or two…