Depth and light

The beginning of the final scene of our production of Caryl Churchill's A Number has been stunningly lit by designer Sarah Elliot. A cool, sculpted atmosphere slowly resolves into a warm halo with the clarity of bright sunlight.

Today, we re-worked the penultimate scene of the play. We're already in previews, and the play is in better shape at this point in the process than any I've worked on. We have more time to tweek, solidify and deepen what we already feel good about before we "open" Saturday night. Yesterday, we added specificity and grounding to the beginning of each scene, but today, we went a bit deeper into the play's climax.

Preview rehearsals can be a significantly artistic part of the process when the script is as good as this one is: in its final moments, A Number evokes the same spirit of release, human contact and fated irony one might experience in a successful Greek tragedy. Seeing the play performed iwith an audience helps to reveal the underlying architecture of the whole.

In a contemporary form that is more taut than that of an ancient tragedy, A Number plots an equally epic journey in just over an hour. There are five scenes in a sequence, but after each one, a progressively longer period of fictional time elapses before the next, while significant offstage events "occur," just as they might in an ancient Greek tragedy. The most significant of these events takes place before Scene Four. But unlike an ancient tragedy, Churchill's play includes no explanatory messenger to describe the epiphantic offstage horrors that, when told, beat a direct path to the play's final scene of recognition and release.

Instead, in A Number, the effect of the unseen, offstage action must be understood by the audience through the being of the actors in the penultimate scene, and the way in which their relationship has been radically shifted by what has occurred offstage. In our production, that scene has been clear and strong -- certainly performance-ready -- but it had been missing the full dimension of the play's invisible "tragic wheel." In the classics, one explicitly feels the turning of the tragic wheel, and that is part of those plays' special appeal. In this contemporary play, the tragic wheel doesn't turn so much as produce a soul-shock by implication -- it is a shock that the characters (i.e., the actors) must live through as though after-the-fact. It's a more private experience that the audience should recognize rather than have explained to them, and it's a challenge to act. I noted in rehearsal, "This is a bit beyond playing the right objective, isn't it?"

Today's wonderful rehearsal moment involved taking the full measure of A Number's tragic value when we discovered that the fourth scene should be played as though the equivalent of the classic messenger scene had already been played... It's interesting how a process like this works with sophisticated colleagues late in the process. For about forty-five minutes we discussed the issue and briefly experimented by approaching short sections of the scene in new ways, shaking off the cobwebs of our previous way of playing. Eventually, through more discussion and sharing of stories, we evoked in the room the experience that we wanted to happen in the scene: a specific, inimitable conversation about deeply shared strife. By a certain age, we've nearly all had conversations like this with lovers or family members: they are very intimate, sometimes confusing and richly emotional -- the world isn't the same for us afterward, and we don't tell other people about them very much.

Perhaps because our culture now is so overtly public, and so obsessively informative, we are left to bear the real emotional substance of our personal tragedies in private. It's not heros or kings we really need to evoke a public emotional intimacy, but specifically imagined characters acted with focused presence in a smaller room...

We worked on the the first third or so of the newly interpreted scene carefully; then the remainder of the scene "played itself," with new staging happening naturally. I was struck by the way that today's meeting felt like an interpretive session, rather than a preview rehearsal to do polish work (as we had done the previous afternoon).

Later, we talked about what happened during this evening's preview performance. The actors were expectant about the changed scene and their anticipation rattled their hold on the first part of the play a bit: it was moderately less clean, less sure and unintentionally riskier. The audience listened better, I think, but seemed restless. I worried that I had derailed the smoothly running train we had previously created. But in the end, the final scene (which we hadn't rehearsed) filled the room much more fully and richly than it had the previous night and the audience experienced a more connected, shared presence.

It has always been the case, I think, that under-girding the plot-line of great stories is a dramatic structure that we all implicitly understand. It is not a formal shape in an analytical sense, but an experience of life's common motions and rhythms. This is what I meant above about feeling the motion--or wheel--of the tragedy: it is the experience of a deep apprehension of change, a kind of prescience about the power of unpredictable forces, like the rumble of an avalanche before it strikes, before the dust settles and we see the world anew. We feel this deep dramatic motion in a way that transcends any specific story--this shared feeling can evoke so many of the other bonds that relate us to each other.

In A Number, Churchill provides the blueprint for evoking our collective understanding in a kind of dramaturgical shorthand mastered over years of writing for the stage. As theatre-makers, it is our job to invite the audience to bear present witness to the underlying bonds that connect us. Our invitation comes in the form of the crafting and playing of the story, built with real presence and experience, so that the audience may "accept" by giving themselves permission to be with those thematic aspects of the play that are not make-believe, that really can and do happen for all of us when we are in the same room and feel life move us inexorably (and sometimes painfully) into the light.

More blogging on the show is here. Ticket info is here.