Open Wardrobes

I am been very remiss in blogging about Doubt rehearsals (which you should of course come and see; details here). We started rehearsals nearly a month ago, which has flown by! We did have a week break in there for Christmas which gave us all a nice chunk of time to work on lines. It's a tough show, no doubt about it (no pun intended), but that's what makes it so satisfying as an actor. With just a cast of four the show will ultimately rise or fall on us. We have a fantastic director (Kevin T. Houle) who is helping us all dig deeper and deeper into this piece, not to mention one of the best stage managers I've worked with (Sue Kuta) who I know will keep things running extremely smoothly, but in the end we four actors have to sustain an hour and a half of thought-provoking drama on our own. It has been a daunting task, as least I've found it to be so, and a ton of work. When so many people have at least seen the movie version, how do you break people's preconceived notions of this play? How do you keep the characters interesting and dynamic above and beyond the concepts being wrestled with? If they are not, the show becomes merely pedantic and the characters two-dimensional mouthpieces.


This at least is a taste of what I've been wrestling with. As Kevin has pointed out many times, this plays is most definitely NOT about whether or not Father Flynn did it. One of my challenges has been to not make that question too easy, to give the audience doubt about what my character may or may not be capable of. We have just under two weeks to go and we are definitely getting there. We have a great cast and I've been enjoying working with them on this. I'm excited for performances and to see what the audiences have to say.


But a New Year would not be complete without a new writing project. November of course was spent in NaNoWriMo, and December brought with it the start of rehearsals and Christmas, but during my break I've finally found some traction on a new project. My friend Brian teaches middle school theater in Georgia and awhile back we had talked about the idea of me writing a short show that he could use as scenes in class. Brian has build a small stage in his classroom (beyond acting he is an accomplished designer) and a flexible set comprised of many doors. We talked about writing something in the commedia dell'arte style, as we both though it would work well with minimal set and the stock characters would give his students s starting place. At the time I was knee-deep in writing the Fringe show, and so while I loved the idea it had to sit on the back burner for awhile.


But over the past few weeks I finally started doing some research on the commedia characters and over the last week started writing a scenario. As the original commedia was all improvised, the actors would choose a scenario for a performance that detailed the entrances and exits and gave the general gist of the plot. From there the performers, who each specialized in one stock character, would create the show on the fly. Later on playwrights such as Goldoni wrote full plays using the commedia characters and style and this was my goal as well. I don't normally start plays with a detailed outline, but in this case I wanted to create such a scenario first in order to replicate the commedia process as much as possible. And so, now having such a scenario in hand I have now started in on the writing process and shall see where it goes.