Day Nine at the LCT Directors Lab

Macbeth rehearsal was both early and short today, due to afternoon shows taking place at LCT. I continued doing free improvisational work, after reading through the text again with the cast. A kind of "aha" moment occurred when I realized that, to bring "the ramp" into "the large rehearsal room" for the presentation, we would now have to bring the large rehearsal room into the space of the ramp. That is, are these walls real? Is this confinement psychological rather than physical? Tomorrow we may start putting something together.

I am working with Peter Brook's notions, including that of the "formless hunch". He writes about this in his memoir, The Shifting Point. In our short Lab context, it's like shaving ice for a cold drink off an iceberg, but the idea is to find ways for the actors to tap their intuition, based on the most immediate, but "formless" of reasons to work on the material. Over time, a form -- and a play -- emerge, as the director watches, encourages, prods, questions and engages, though early on, does not impose -- in fact, hardly does anything, compared to more traditional notions of directing.

One way of looking at more prevalent ways of directing is to see the director as a mediator between the text and the actor. The director provides an external form for the text from the outset (often in collaboration with the actors), and the actors must learn to "fill it". The result is usually the imitation of an idea, sometimes with great credibility. A way of looking at Brook's techniques would be to see the director as a mediator between the actor's ideas and his or her intuition -- this is done indirectly by giving the actor the opportunity to find his or her sensitivity to real things -- space, sound, other actors, their own bodies -- before donning the limits of externals like staging, text and "choices." In my limited experience, actors working in this way can tap into something deeper, broader and more evanescent. The form of the eventual production grows from this point, rather than from outside it.

It's worth noting that some of Brook's methods, as well as a host of improvisatory, kinetic and spacial work developed in various parts of the world in the 1960s and 70s are still with us today (this came up in the Chaikin talk I went to yesterday), particularly as part of actor training regimens and "warm-ups." But relatively few companies develop productions which begin with the actors, fewer still with an encouragement of intuition rather than analysis. This is not to disparage any other way of working -- nor does Brook, as he sees the theater as being successful anytime audience members become more sensitive to one another, which can happen in many ways.

In the afternoon, many of us went to see the new Paul Rudnick play at the Mitzi Newhouse.