The First Day of Rehearsal

RICHARD THE THIRD or "Early Shakespeare Murder-Spree in Verse"
Day One

There was a lot of nervous excitement this morning.

Liam Vincent (the actor playing Catesby), while waiting to be costume-fitted said "It's like the first day of school."

"Yes," I replied, "I actually left the house wondering if the other kids are going to make fun of my clothes like before."

Is it meaningful that the first day of rehearsals fell on the first of the month? The cast (a whopping one, this is one of the histories after all) assembled at the Heinz. There followed the usual series of introductory remarks; usual not in a redundant way but almost ritualistic. Everyone wants to start rehearsals off right. Even more so since this is the first play in the CalShakes season.

Mark has filled the cast with a slew of CalShakes regulars (or irregulars take you pick) notably Liam Vincent, James Carpenter, Dan Hiatt, Sharon Lockwood, Catherine Castellanos and Susannah Livingston (the artist formerly known as Schulman). As well as Elvy Yost and Eddie Webster. Several new faces (or new to me) as well: Blake Ellis and Brad Myers have dropped in from Fresno. And of course our Richard is played by a wonderful actor Reg Rogers. Who I didn't hesitate to Google all up and down the internet.

After the speechs had been made Mark briefed us on his first-day impressions of the play. "Richard's supposed to be this first incarnation of evil in writing or something." he said, "I don't think so. Everyone in the play is self-serving it's just his time to shine." The model of the set was brought out; a fascinating thing that looked like an Elizabethan stage dissected and spread around with neon and flourescents gravy. The costumes were described and sound almost painfully awesome (modern armor and sort of gothic) and everyone was given the newly cut script.

This is incredibly important, of course. As any one will tell you (anyone being a drama-nerd) no-one sees the same Richard the Third twice. The play is nearly Shakespeare's longest and has so many knotty bits (not naughty bits, but those too) and also some quite long and difficult passages so that the only solution is to cut and cut bravely. This means that any production is necessarily a kind of adaptation and very unique. The 90's Ian McKellan film (which was excellent) is a great example of how much restructuring and surgery a given version needs. Mark and the able-bodied CalShakes dramaturg Laura Hope did a killer first draft for the first rehearsal which they made clear to us all was a FIRST draft.

"Some of these cuts are for real and some are to provoke debate." Mark pithed. And that's true; I'm sure many more cuts will be proposed, argued, rejected, re-preposed and finally snuck in while nobody's looking. If surgery were done like this it'd take a year to get your tonsils out, but for a play it actually works very well. Plus it's nice to have some big cuts made without you. If the director decides it you can sigh and mourn for the line that never saw the light of day and move on. But if it's your decision then it becomes a whole "tempest of the soul" thing. And that's way more interesting onstage then in your room.

After that, Mark forwent (real word?) the usual "read through the whole play while the administrative staff quietly files out of the room" part of first rehearsals and had us launch right into the slow but valuable text work. A nice move, I thought. So much of the first day is ritual, meant to inspire people and set mood for the process to begin, that it's easy to forget that's it's also a day to rehearse the play. And there is something really cool about sitting down with all your scripts and hearing a guy start you off with "Now is the winter of our discontent ..." It's high job-satisfaction and a good way to start a play.