The day many McCarter community members have long awaited has finally come: Tarell has moved to Nassau Street and rehearsals are underway for the world premiere of his The Brother/Sister Plays. The first few days in the rehearsal process has been, admittedly, a little overwhelming. We started out the first day of rehearsal with a business meeting run by our Resident Stage Manager, Cheryl Mintz. As Cheryl went over the usual information: schedule, contact sheet, Equity guidelines, it quickly became clear that this process is like no other that the cast or artistic team has experienced. With three shows opening in repertory under the direction of two different directors, the schedule for the next few months is daunting to say the least. By the time In the Red and Brown Water opens, we will already be starting technical rehearsal for Brothers Size and Marcus, so the actors will be rehearsing 2 plays during the day and performing a third at night - and all this without understudies!

We were all a bit dazed by the end of the meeting, but after a read-through of In the Red and Brown Water, Tina Landau, the director, decided to jump right in. Tina talked about how the most important part of In the Red and Brown Water for her is truly creating an ensemble. In this non-traditional piece, all of the actors play a pantheon of gods (derived from the Yoruba spiritual tradition) who weave in and out of the story they are telling together. In order to start building that feeling of a community of storytellers and create a common vocabulary, Tina launched the actors into an intense introduction to Viewpoints, a technique for movement and improvisation Tina developed along with director and mentor Anne Bogart. Originally based on a set of “viewpoints” choreographers use in creating a dance, the training Tina works with separates movement into 10 distinct qualities (eg. tempo, direction, shape, etc.). Taking the simple movement of running, for example, one can play with extremes of tempo: how does running look, for example, if one goes very very fast? And if one goes as slow as it is possible to go and still call it movement? Within the tempos one can also vary the size and fluidity of the run. It is fascinating how the different “runs” tells an entirely different story.

As we went through these improvisations, Tina introduced a really great term way for us to express when some gesture or movement seems really appropriate to our show. Apparently on the set of Miami Vice, there was one person whose job was to communicate between the literary, design and production departments to make sure the show ended up as a complete world. Rather than having to explain every decision, they could simply say “That’s Vice!” or “That’s not Vice!” We’ve now introduced this term to our rehearsal process, so whenever something works really well the whole room explodes with calls of “Vice!!!” and then we know all the collaborators are on the same page!

Posted by Sarah Wansley, Directing/Producing Intern at McCarter Theatre.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 10:20 am and is filed under Get Connected, The Brother/Sister Plays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.