Sorry I haven’t posted in a few days. I’ve been very busy. Stick Fly previews have been going really well. I went on Saturday night, and the audience (nearly a full-house) seemed engaged and involved. The show gets smoother and better every time I see it, a combination of directorial tweaks, actors gaining more comfort and confidence, and Lydia’s small adjustments.

At the left, you can see a picture that Producing Director Mara took a few days ago backstage. Julia (who plays Cheryl) was preparing for her first entrance in the dressing room. She’s a pretty darn good photographer, that Mara. Tartuffe’s first rehearsal is in a few minutes, so I’ll give an update on that later today.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

So, Stick Fly had its final dress rehearsal last night, with an audience of forty or fifty subscribers, guests, and McCarter staff members. Overall, it was a great show. Naturally still some of the technical hiccups you expect at this point in the process, but in general things were impressively smooth. It was lots of fun to finally see the show in all the glory of its set, lights, sound, and costumes. Not to mention the massive amounts of props. But I think my favorite addition of last night was the audience itself.

It was so wonderful to be there as many of these people experienced the characters and the story for the very first time. At this point I’ve seen so many iterations of the script, popped in on so many rehearsals at so many different points in the process, that it’s sometimes hard to remember the moments of surprise and delight I experienced as the play first unfolded before me. But I recalled them afresh as I heard and felt the audience members around me gasp, cluck, laugh, and sigh their way through the developing relationships and gradually revealed secrets of Lydia Diamond’s Stick Fly.

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Last night was Dress Rehearsal for Stick Fly. After the rehearsal ended, our hard-working Props Master (Michele) and Technical Director (Chris) sat down for a well-deserved rest before last night’s production meeting (which started around 11:15pm). The table you see in front of them is Michele’s mobile office, which she has during every show. It is a combination of technology, tools, and sugar.

Stick Fly is a props-heavy show. The play takes place over several days in a vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard. Unless you work in a prop shop, you might not realize how much time is spent on a day-to-day basis is spent handling objects. In Stick Fly, characters eat, drink, clean, unpack, shop, play games, go fishing, talk on the phone, read, write, and do countless other activities which require objects. In addition, the house in which they live is filled with books, pictures, art, rugs, and other details that make it seem a realistic and believable home. Michele (and her staff of three full-time employees) are responsible for obtaining all of these props, which they either buy, make, rent or borrow.

More thoughts on the dress rehearsal once I’ve caffeinated myself a bit more.

See also:

• 15 Days, 7 Hours and 3 Minutes
• Stick Fly Props

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

I stopped by the wardrobe room yesterday before the evening session of tech, and found Kristin, McCarter’s “First Hand,” adjusting a belt. The costume shop is a well-threaded machine: the Costume Shop Manager (and her assistant) coordinate with each show’s Costume Designer, and get sketches (and fabric swatches) of the designs; then, the Drapers create patterns, and Kristin (the First Hand), cuts out the patterns in the chosen fabric; then everyone works together to stitch them up.

In the picture at left, Kristin was working on a belt that the Stick Fly character Kimber wears in the play (she is adjusting it while looking into a mirror). The belt has to be able to put on during a quick change, so Kristin was playing around with different ways to attach it so that it could be put on in a matter of seconds. During last night’s tech rehearsal, Cheryl, the Production Stage Manager, was timing out the quick-changes with a stopwatch. After each attempt, she would tell everyone how they did (shaving off another 4 seconds, etc.). It was a little bit like watching the coach of a swim-team.

The neat thing about Kristin (and about many of the staff members at McCarter) is that in addition to supporting McCarter’s artists, she also has a career as an artist in her own right. As a costume designer, her work was recently seen as part of NYC’s Summer Play Festival, and her designs have started to crop up all over New Jersey. So when she’s big and famous, let’s hope she remembers McCarter!

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

So, this past weekend I found myself in Washington, D.C. at the Kennedy Center’s Page to Stage festival, a three-day weekend of readings, open rehearsals, and panel discussions featuring 40 different theater companies from around the area, designed (according to their webpage) “to produce and support the success of new plays and musicals.”

I went to see a play written by a friend of mine who started the Playwright’s Group of Baltimore. This group presented readings of twelve ten-minute plays members of the group had written specifically for the festival (each of which included, somewhere in the script, both a whistle and a naked light bulb—and you wouldn’t believe the diverse directions into which this simple prompt sent these twelve playwrights). I also got to see a developmental reading of an absolutely brilliant solo performance piece by Josh Lefkowitz called Now What?, which is all about his process of figuring out what he should write about in the high-pressure wake of the massive success of his first solo show, Help Wanted. The reading was fabulous–witty and engaging and very, very fun–and I for one can’t wait to see the finished performance.

Anyway, all of this got me very excited about the whole process of creating new theatrical work and developing plays and playwrights, which is pretty much my passion when it comes to theater. One of the main reasons that McCarter’s literary internship was at the top of my list was the theater’s strong commitment to the development of new work and groundbreaking theater. With an Artistic Director who is herself a playwright, frequent theatrical premieres on its main stages, and a variety of developmental readings and festivals scattered throughout each season, McCarter presented itself to my anticipatory investigation as a hotbed of theatrical growth and innovation.

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Remember this Labor Day Weekend? While you were off causing trouble and whatnot? Well the Stick Fly cast/crew spent the weekend working their patooties off (as my mother would say). Saturday was the first day of tech (aka “technical rehearsals”). 11:00am-9:30pm. The actors worked on the set, with the props, in the costumes, over the sound, under the lights, and other such prepositional phrases. The designers were all present, and McCarter’s crew was putting in long hours to support their work. It was a huge day, but a lot was accomplished.

Sunday, most of the crew had a day off, and the actors came in for a “work-light rehearsal,” without the costumes, lights, sound, but on the set. Fight Supervisor Brent came in and taught some new punches (I can’t tell you more about it without spoiling the play!), but it was kinda awesome. Anyway, it was a busy busy weekend. Don’t you worry, the actors got Monday off. Today is another tech rehearsal (10:00am-11:00pm!), and we’ll be rehearsing until late in preparation for tomorrow’s Final Dress Rehearsal. And then Friday is the First Preview! Time flies when you’re having fun.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.