18 Days to Opening: Stage Magic
Eleven actors. Sixteen characters. One musician. Two monsters. One horse. One dragon. Pond, sky, fields on all sides. A mountaintop at the edge of the Bay of Fundy. Stage magic.
Day one of Beowulf rehearsals—or day eight, depending how you count, as the five actors playing the major roles have been here since last Tuesday getting a head start—but this is day one for me and for the remaining six actors joining in.
It’s outdoor theatre but we begin indoors. We’ve shook the hands, signed the contracts, paid up the coffee fund, met all the staff at the Ross Creek Centre, seen the costume designs, wondered at the array of percussion instruments that will become the story’s musical character.
We’ve met the first three parts of the dragon puppet—the head, one leg, and two ribs. Three actors will operate those body parts, nine actors will eventually animate the whole puppet. Somehow they’ll collectively create a beast to battle Beowulf, somehow without tripping over each other, somehow within three weeks. Alexis and Jeff are the puppet masters. Jeff demonstrates operating the head and one leg of the prototype, telling us the tricks will be walking together like a lizard, and making the ribs breathe. Alexis sets the condition that there will be dragon practice and exercises every day, we’re aiming for an injury-free battle to the death.
Which naturally segues to the sword-fighting. Jamie and Ben show us the sword-training scene they worked up last week. Broadswords zinging through the air, blades on blade, swords on shields, crashing steel on steel. It’s more stage magic, but aided by Nathan playing percussion, it’s a startling scene. Nothing’s held back, Jamie’s panting by the end, not faked.
I seem to make it injury-free as well through the script’s first read-through. Playwright reactions to their first reading fall somewhere between elation and black despair. I’ll call this one tempered relief. None of the scenes hit me as disasters. Several are very good. A couple clearly need an overhaul, but a couple might be home runs. Nothing leaves me in a suicidal fit—good sign.
The leads—Jeremy and Jamie as Beowulf and Lara—are fantastic. All five who have been here a week already are. The six who started today sound close to, or even already great on day one. Tons of palpable chemistry already. I can get away with an awful lot with a cast this good. The pluses are adding up.
It’s too long though. Probably 20 minutes to lose, we’re agreed it really needs to run without an intermission. Director Ken says 20 minutes will come out easy. Directors always say that. I say 12 will come easy. The other 8 will come one way or another.
Last two hours of the day we’re outside in the playing space, staging the opening. Alexis—puppet master, actor, and associate director—introduces the eleven to the opening sequence worked out in the first week. Song, movement, percussion, explosive percussion, running and ducking, we’re in a war zone. And Jamie’s opening story, the first lines of Beowulf. Beautiful. Half a dozen short cuts to make, easy.
I meet the dragon puppet designer, Karen—pronounced CARR-in, “German,” she says. “Or English.” She’s brought a couple more dragon parts and a length of rope, probably five meters, to represent the length of the tail, to see if it seems the right proportion with actors manipulating it. We share the perspective that it’s great to be able to work out and build the puppet—and the script—in response to the actors’ work, instead of building the whole show in advance and forcing all the pieces to fit. As we talk, Alexis re-thinks the blocking on the fly and sends half the actors into the woods to the left, the other half to pond’s edge to the right, while composer, Mark, sings out for them a new variation on the opening song.
Burgandy, veteran of—I’ll have to check how many Two Planks and a Passion productions and get back to you—pulls me aside. From the readthrough, she says the trial scene is still wrong. Burgandy was in the script workshop a year ago, where the scene was considerably different. She suggests a direction for a rewrite. My wife, Martine, had the same problem and suggested the same sort of change. Independent verification is pretty convincing. Ken agrees. I’ll try to have a quickie new version of the trial scene for tomorrow, sort of a prototype, just in case we get to it.
Good running start.
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