Building Beowulf: Playwright Rick Chafe’s Rehearsal Journal



Jeremy Webb (Beowulf) &  Burgandy Code (Grendel's Mother) 

 5 Days to Opening:  Crouching Actor, Hidden Dramaturg

Brilliant actors.  Shockingly good first run-through Sunday night.  The show is down from a flabby 2 1/4 hours to a svelte 100 minutes and getting tighter.  New work in theatre is a collaborative blood sport.

A week ago I was up to the neck in rewrites and cuts. Actors needed final versions of their scenes so they could get off book and get to the real work.  I was stuck on a tough-to-unknot second act problem, right where they always get tangled. 

Actor Burgandy offered to become my dramaturg for the rest of rehearsals.  The dramaturg is the listening mirror for the playwright, reading the scenes—or in rehearsal, reading and watching them—becoming the play’s first audience, and reflecting back to the writer her impressions of what the play seems to be saying.  Lots of questions, suggestions, support, options, alternatives are offered, and sometimes, as in this case, lots of editing.

It’s Burgandy’s first try at dramaturgy.  Five days later I can say she’s precise and insightful in her reading, a genius at finding the detail in moments, and a brilliant editor. 

Stage Manager Heather Lewis (left) and Assistant SM, Morgan  

The first night we worked together, she insisted on going over the first scene.  It’s a long one, a large meeting scene, ten actors on stage.  I’d just cut it from about 18 minutes to 12 and promised the actors they could go ahead and memorize it.  Burgandy challenged me on every line and we cut it to maybe 8 minutes.  But… could we devote any more rehearsal time to re-working the scene in its trimmed form?  I told director Ken we’d made a huge improvement to the script, but it meant going over scene one yet again.  Understandably, this was greeted as not a good thing, but as I’ve said already, Ken’s a game guy and agreed to read it.  Five minutes later, our stage manager, Heather, started Xeroxing cast copies, we were going back to scene one.

The actors were also understandably a little surprised and possibly skeptical at receiving yet another fresh copy of the scene… but it isn’t just Ken, this whole company is a game lot.  It was clear the scene was a vast improvement, spirits lifted, and so it went through the week, at least from my point of view.  By the next day Burg and I had cut and rewritten 20  minutes or more off the first half of the play.  Ken and the actors are reblocking and cleaning up the scenes with the leaner, muscular lines. 



Rhys Bevan-John (Drengi) on break

 Then we hit the second act knots.  Burgandy sets about a campaign to strip two of the plot complications that have been brick-walling me.  Much denial, anger, bargaining and so on later, plus three nights this week that went past 4am, we have our script reduced almost a third in length and an exponentially improved story.

Sunday morning, I deliver the last set of rewrites.  Jeremy Beowulf Webb looks up from the new pages, perhaps a little baffled, questions me to the effect, “I’ve been pursuing one goal since the first scene.  Have you completely changed what that goal is?”  I answer in effect, “yes.”  Perhaps a dangerous thing to put to an actor six days before opening.  Within less than three minutes, Jeremy has worked the whole turnaround, re-thought and absorbed an entirely new throughline for his character, Jeremy and Jamie are off and running the new scene. 

Sunday afternoon, Chris, Johnny, Jeff, and Andrea, our new warrior recruits readying for their first battle, have a rewritten scene with Jamie.  There’s two clear possible interpretations of the scene, they’d like to know which one I had in mind.  I answer I had the first one in mind but the second seems much better.  Ken, Burg, the actors and I collectively figure out Jamie won’t enter six lines into the scene.  Instead, the recruits will have their own scene for the first page, Jamie will join them at the end.  We scratch out a block of text, move another block, change a couple lines, read the new version.  Much better.  Call it speed workshopping.

Jeremy Beowulf Webb, Stage Manager Heather Lewis,
and Artistic Director, Ken Schwartz discuss the finer points

Sunday evening’s run-through was startling, far beyond anything I could have hoped for at this stage of rehearsal.  This was the week Burgandy saved my bacon, Ken and the actors hung in and supported us the whole way through.  I owe more beers than can be drunk in a single opening night.

Monday was the last day off we’ll have before opening.  Finished the final rewrites Monday morning, emailed them out to the actors 20 minutes late on my noon deadline.  Now I get out of the way, catch up on sleep, and the actors work their butts off for the next five days to make gold of it.