Thursday September 21 2006

Day 8 - Wed Sept 20 - Richard showed us two versions of a portion of a scene just to emphasize for us the playing style - in a play that moves very little there aren't a lot of "events" - not a lot happens so moments can be heightened if they are allowed the room to "land" - it's similar to the film/theatre style debate - actors talk about and wonder at the difference between stage and screen work - it's a matter of scale - what reads or is detectable from the back row of GCTC is different from a movie house with an actor's face magnified in close-up on a giant screen - it calls for a shift in perspective on the part of the actor - someone once described working with Bogart and thinking the guy's mystique way overblown - later that same day upon seeing rushes (screening of the day's filming) the actor got to see an extreme close up of Bogey and the meerest flicker of an eyebrow conveyed the whole story - mystique renewed

- in our case Richard suggests find complexity of meaning and intention in the stillness of a story where a stuff happens in a small way - a critic once used the term " the hurried pace of incident" to describe a story that threw so much at it's audience that the reviwer at least felt lost - this tale is being shaped around a restraint that echoes louder for the quiet that it happens in - there's a big point of departure our director has given us

- it does feel like departure since we are still new to the staging process - we had a run-through for the designers on Tuesday and since then we've gone back in for another pass - yesterday more detailed work on the first scene - feels like we did our initial fly-past and have now come down fron thirty thousand feet to twenty or so - the ground looks closer and things stand out more - but there's a lot to do yet -

Day 9 Thursday - more layers - we finish off some work on the first scene - Richard talks about the ability of Lawrence and Graves to engage in verbal jousting that has layers of meaning and intent - there's a deftness to the thinking that comes from encyclopedic knowledge - they memorized the OED (Oxford english Dictionary) just for fun - Richard describes a Tom Stoppard play where he puns at a power of four - his puns have four levels of twisted humour and still the imagery evoked stirs the gut - arguments delivered with a sang froid - gloves off - bare knuckle of banter

we're also now folding in the very practical aspects of scenic shifts - we choreograph the mechanics of reinventing the space to create another locale - a bit of precision movement that still manages to keep the story going without too much of a pause

my bike lost a peddle today so over lunch I'll try to fix that - my hour long rides from Mimico are feeling longer as the days turn autumnal and the west wind blows - the sun is shining today though and it's always a treat to ride in along the lake