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.