11/18/19

My dear Anton Pavlovich,

I regret that it has been so long since I last wrote to you. We've done some lovely work on your play, and I'm still not sure exactly where it's going to lead us. We worked a lot on time, and tempo, and rhythm for the individual characters, and have begun to find out what happens when these characters bring their various attributes together. I hope we can find a way to find casualness (which may or may not be the right word)... We have played some with improvising "this is a day in Act II that is not in the script." The normal day when "nothing" happens, though, of course, so many things happen on "nothing" days. So we played around with that for about an hour yesterday, to mixed results. I'm afraid too much is going on; the actors want so badly to do exciting things. I was hoping we could spend some time doing NOT exciting things, since so much of life is not exciting, but it's just THERE. Anyway, we'll keep working on it; perhaps I can find a different exercise to tap into that.

I'm hoping today we can start to tap into casual conversation, just chit chat. I don't mean to say necessarily that chit chat is what happens in your play, because that isn't it at all. But so much happens DURING chit chat, doesn't it? Actors so often want to do things with their words. They want the words to function this, and accomplish that, to encompass huge amounts of meaning. Words are always a tool, of course. They always are spoken for a reason. But quite often what we say and what we are doing are two very different things. Sometimes we speak just to speak. To pass the time. To chat. Actors so often end up with stilted cadences, and oh, they push push push the words. I don't want them to act the words. I want them to act the play. I just want them to SAY the words.

Anyway, I have a feeling that our work with Three Sisters is actually going to take us into staging the play as you wrote it next semester. I think the work we're doing now will really inform us, and hopefully the performance will be much richer because of it.

Yours,
Curtis