End of the Semester

My dear Sir,

We are now at a "wrapping up" point for the semester as the cast and I have a few weeks off before soldiering on. The past few months have been extremely productive, and ended with a real breakthrough this past Sunday.

Beginning the process, I did mountains of reading about yourself and about Russia at the time, and on critical takes on your plays. I covered my dining table with a stack of papers and books at least a foot high. I was afraid to move them, and after a few weeks, when they were moved for me, I was thankful that they'd been placed out of sight. I'd digested them, and didn't need to have them standing before me as an obstacle. As you know, I used time and its imagery as my way of initially accessing the text. My actors developed tempos for the characters to inhabit, and we worked with that for a few weeks as they got more and more familiar with and involved with the play. We reduced monologues to their most important sounds, and created movement pieces based on these. We created the timeline previously mentioned, which seemed to have a great effect on the actors in realizing the vast difference between the fast, American times they live in and the much more legato time of the play. The actors wrote character bios and reactions to the work we'd done. We created movement exercises to explore what time might feel like for the characters (though, since this was at the beginning of the process, these were not quite as fully realized as they might be were we to try the exercise again, which we might do). We explored what happens when all the characters' tempos exist in the same room, what happens when those explorations lead into text, what happens if the actors improv mundane situations both in and out of those tempos.

We then started some very basic exploratory scene work, first reading a scene out loud and then trying to improv our way through them. We also improved through a number of scenes that do not occur in the play, including Andrei asking Natasha to meet his family for the first time and also that initial meeting. We continued to work on this for the past few weeks, making steady but very slow progress. I showed the actors the film Vanya on 42nd Street as we tried to explore what it means to talk, just to simply talk, trying to overcome their impulses toward performance. We had a number of conversations about conversation itself, its rules, its meanings, how and why we do it.

And then, Sunday, improving our way through the end of Act I, it happened. Only for a brief moment. The second time we tried the improv that day, the actors all listened to each other for a moment, and responded. The scene had gotten off-course, and I wanted to stop them, but since they were actually conversing, I let it run until the conversation became forced. We tried it again, with Kris clarifying a bit before we started, and then, for a minute or two, there was magic. They were around the table, and the sisters were needling Natasha through subtext. Conversation happened, they talked, they listened, they responded, and they made Natasha uncomfortable through actual conversation. They conversed around the notion of making her unwelcome. It was beautiful.

And then it ended abruptly. But for a group of actors who want so much to DO, and not just to LIVE, it was an amazing moment, and I couldn't be more happy that we reached it before adjourning for the semester.

I've personally learned so much through the experience so far, working in this new, extended way. What happened on Sunday for that brief moment was richer and deeper than anything I've been able to achieve with actors on other projects. Having given up staging for the time being, and working with them to discover the play and its possibilities, my ideas for staging are growing along with their work, though these are still far from being formed. It's just so exciting to me to see these young actors challenge themselves and grow, and to be excited by the growth itself.

I'm still not sure how this experience will affect my work on other projects that I don't have months and months to mount. But I'm sure it will. As we go into next semester, with its promise of actual performance at the end of the Spring, and with new actors joining us next month, I'm sure I'll solidify those notions.