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.