Building Beowulf: Playwright Rick Chafe’s Rehearsal Journal



Jamie Konchak as Lara and Jeremy Webb as Beowulf

 11 Days to Opening: The Woman on the Horse

This morning we are all right chuffed. Jamie Konchak, here as our heroine, Lara, beside Jeremy Webb as Beowulf, was nominated last night for three—THREE!—Betties—the Calgary Theatre Awards—for her performances there last year. Jamie’s competing against herself for Best Actress (Drama) in Macbeth and Reasons to Be Pretty, and Best Supporting Actress in The Penelopiad. A loud and proud shout out to Jamie.



Karen Jones Puppet Designer assisted by

Apprentice Stage Manager Morgan McMahon (back turned)



Day off yesterday gave me a chance to catch up with the backlog of rewrites for the week. While the actors worked on swords and puppetry this morning, I snuck in some script work. My to-do list is pretty darn long, but light on leftover changes still to make in the first half, heavy on the second half. Ken and I devised a plan to finish working to the end of the script tomorrow and head back to work the actors from the beginning while I keep ahead of them. Once the rehearsal hall cleared out, I stayed behind and started in from scene one.

Sometimes cutting a scene feels like stumbling around, not sure whether I’m cutting the good stuff or the bad stuff, improving it or just making it shorter. But there comes a point in rehearsal, maybe just of necessity, where you know the actors voices and the scenes so well that the decisions are easy and unneeded words and lines just fall away. Finished the night probably halfway through the first half of the play, blue felt pen highlighter marking all the additions and deletions of this time around, distinguishing them from the yellow highlighter of the last time around, and the black and blue ink of the times before the script started getting messy. End of night, I have a nice pile of cuts and insert pages to hand them tomorrow.



Jamie Konchuk as Lara in a scene you'll never see.



Which calls for one more Jamie photo today. Yesterday began with the announcement the first scene of the play, where Lara tells the story of Beowulf to three children in the woods, is cut. The last time I worked with this company, I didn’t find out Ken had cut the first scene of the play until I arrived for the preview, so I thought I’d strike first this time. I liked the scene very much, but it really is a much better start to the story to jump straight into the second scene in mid-action. So to our left is a photo of the scene you’ll never see.

Building Beowulf: Playwright Rick Chafe’s Rehearsal Journal

13 Days to Opening: Cut, Cut, Cut

Playwright’s holiday over, today was the end of the week stumble-through, everything blocked to date, pages 1-70 scheduled. In reality, this beast is getting really big. With 8 minutes left in the work week, Ken calls it at page 53, 90 minutes into a no-intermission show. Sharpen your swords, there’s going to be cutting and lots of blood.

9:00 a.m., as always, Ken picks me up for the 10 minute drive through green up the mountain. It’s foggy, moody, gorgeous. We don’t get much fog on the prairies, I love this. Roxy Music’s on Ken’s iPod. We give 5 minutes to our fan boy love of everything Bryan Ferry has ever done, then 5 is left for Ken to trash everything ever done by one of my favorite movie directors, Tim Burton.

But first the rewrites: day begins with Jeremy, Burgandy, and Ken looking over the tiny new 8-line scene from yesterday. They give a try at connecting the obscure and bewildering action contained therein with the bewildering and obscure action contained within the earlier meeting of their two characters. In fact, they each try connecting the action of the two scenes in about eight different ways. Nope, none fit. I have no defence. Many rewrite options are suggested, I promise a quickie rewrite of one of them before the afternoon stumble through.

The rest of the morning is spent on the story of Beowulf’s battles with Grendel and his Mother. Jonny tries Grendel for the first time and is kind of fantastic—somehow he’ll have to manage it on stilts by next week, which he’s also trying for the first time. Jamie is teaching him in between rehearsing her scenes. Which leaves not a lot of time as she is in about 95% of the scenes in the play. Also working her fight choreography on breaks and learning to play guitar, which seems to be for relaxation. The Grendel and Mom stuff is a big nasty scene, but with a great energy… and it comes in at about 27 minutes in the afternoon stumble through. It should probably be about 15. Snip snip.

Another fantastic lunch, another amazing benefit of working at the Ross Creek Arts Centre—Greg and Carole’s cooking. For the first time I have to miss my favorite part of the day—joining in with Alexis’s warm up and then watching the daily hour of dragon work—to find a corner and come up with a rewrite for the morning’s scene. All for naught, it’s in the 17 pages we don’t make it to today. We’ll get to it Tuesday.

The stumble-through starts at 3:00, the dust clears at 5:22. The scenes are pretty clear, the actors are way ahead for this stage as far as I can see, there’s no shortage of good stuff and I think the story’s emerging. We say good nights, tomorrow’s day off for the actors. I will get all the days off I want once the script is declared complete and no more cuts or rewrites allowed. But not tomorrow. Ken offers to start marking cuts in the Grendel scene while I sort through rehearsal photos. We hang around and start casually talking about more cuts. And more cuts. And more cuts. All of which will be my work for tomorrow. Cut. Rewrite. Repeat.

All day it’s been foggy out. Beautiful, moody, green below, grey above. I wish pleasant weather for everyone’s day off, but for me, this would be perfect for tomorrow, writer’s cocoon weather.

Building Beowulf: Playwright Rick Chafe’s Rehearsal Journal

14 Days to Opening: Bringing the Game Up

Just wrote a new version of a speech for Daniel, a rewrite for back in the second scene. Daniel plays Gautr, an old father to two sons,the favoured son and the overlooked son, of course. He has a stirring speech in the course of a war council, cajoling the council members with past glories of Geatland, demanding they prove themselves worthy of their ancestors. The first version was okay. But Daniel is doing far better work of the text than the text is giving him to work with. Which is a nice sort of challenge to the playwright, the imperative to bring your game up to be worthy of your actors.

This morning begins inauspiciously for our playwright. Ken’s laptop is open, I mention I have a new scene to insert, that fits right between the first two short scenes we’ll work today. This one’s even shorter, maybe twelve lines long. Which makes three short little scenes in a row. “When did this turn into a movie?” asks Ken. Or something like that. Which is a big ouch. Film is short, pithy, visual scenes. Theatre is long, meaty, probing, dialogue soaked scenes. Directors everywhere disdain playwrights who write film scenes for stage. My next play has 48 tiny short scenes. But Ken’s a game guy. We’ll try the new scene tomorrow, but already he’s got to re-imagine how to set the first two tiny short scenes of the day to accommodate this new one.

The first scene up is, well, maybe eight lines long. It feels kind of, uh… filmy. Andrea is Gussi, a young man recruited and unprepared for battle, about to go AWOL. Rhys is an upper class warrior who catches him sneaking off, but is beyond caring. Within two minutes, we’ve all realized the initial circumstances of the scene are wrong. The imagery in the middle is completely confusing. And the ending is…. a big, long film moment. Rhys and Andrea manage to put it together and pull off a completely workable storytelling scene. But… their work is far better than what the text is forcing them to make do with. And I have no idea how else to set this crucial moment. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it? Or bring the game up? Table it for now.

Jamie and Ben – AKA Lara and Halfburinn—are up next. After much problem-solving over how we’re going to establish the new convention of a tent on stage, the intimate love scene works out quite beautifully. Moving on, disaster strikes (in the story this time, not the rehearsal hall). Tons of physical stuff to work out, big fight scene, but the bones of the scene are good. Composer Mark’s marimba underneath make a beautiful sad linking of the two contrasting halves of the scene. And it all leads to the big trial scene I rewrote my first night here.

Which works far better than I’d supposed. It’s long. Or I suppose you could call it a long, meaty, probing, dialogue soaked scene. And it seems to work, holds tension, has lots of identifiable moments I can trim to tighten it up. But I have a long list of scene fixes to work on and I agree with Ken not to mess with it any further until after tomorrow’s end of the week stumble-through of everything we’ve worked through up until now.

11pm, I broke that promise the moment I got home. Went straight to the trial scene, spent two hours revising, then started chipping away at the list…. Only got three items crossed off, but including that nice, meaty little speech for Daniel to sink his chops into. All coming along.

Building Beowulf: Playwright Rick Chafe’s Rehearsal Journal

15 Days to Opening: Unexploded Bombs

Unexploded bombs are the little setups you write into a script early on, and don’t get around to dealing with them. Our hero gets a letter she doesn’t want to open, tucks it into a drawer. We all know she’s going to open that letter eventually in the story—at least someone has to. I think I only have a couple unexploded bombs left in the script. There’s one I’ve been worrying over for two drafts now, couldn’t figure out a way to pay off on a set up, but just detonated it now, 11pm. Just a tiny short scene, just at the right time. As these things do, it strikes me as pure gold now, especially as it’s 11pm and I have zero judgment left. Things have an unfortunate way of seeming otherwise by next morning.

Another beautiful morning, we moved outside and ran everything we’ve worked on so far this week to very near the halfway mark. No disasters, no detonations I noticed. I got to play photographer all through it, which is probably a good idea. I paid worry to the details of how the scenes worked, put all my concentration into how they looked through a lens.

Yes, the capes are the first piece of the costumes to be delivered. And no, great as they look, the sunglasses and sun hats are not part of the design.

After the run, Burgandy slipped up sideways to me, script in hand, asked if I wanted to hear a suggestion on a scene. Sort of, in a strange way, like one of the characters she’s playing does to our poor friend, Beowulf. I’ve come to expect these mid-rehearsal visits, or rather hope for them. Because she always brings a very precise observation about a moment that just doesn’t quite work—a script problem, not an acting problem—and then we have a quiet little conversation that, so far, has always led to an elegant solution. Burgandy has the gift of turning a script problem into an opportunity, an unexploded bomb.

In the afternoon, Jeff led the dragoneers with their prototype body pieces on an attack pattern through the playing space, to their destined battle with Beowulf. Manipulating the head, Jeff calls out the choreography, “Attack! Two, three—Rear up! Big Breath! Forward and turn!” This is just getting the track down he repeats to his team of nine, “This isn’t puppetry yet.” We get the basic track of motions down, he promises, and gradually, gradually, add layers and then details.

Turned cloudy and cooler in the afternoon. Fine weather for dragons.

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…