First Week Of Rehearsals

Okay, our first week of rehearsals is done aaaaaand... so is the script!

Let me try to explain this while also honoring Dan's privacy about his writing process... ...Atheist was originally written as part of NaPliWriMo... it was written in a month, and Dan basically used every device he could think of to get from point A to point B.  

When I got that script (approx. 75 pages in length) I thought "hey, this is really awesome and inventive and fun! I'd love to do it! It probably needs to lose 10 pages or so and there are a couple of moments where I'm totally lost, but otherwise, I'm good". But this was not to come to pass.  As Dan went back through the script, he noticed large-scale changes that needed to be made and thus ended up doing a much more major re-write (that also shortened the play by 20 pages including added new material).

The end result is a much more tightly focused (and tightly wound) piece of work.  It relentlessly barrels forward from beginning to end AND the journey we're all going on is a lot clearer.  It's a pretty amazing piece of work.

The play divides into two parts, one largely comic one largely serious, yesterday as we read through the final draft of the script, I saw the second half of the play in my head, moment to moment, how it would look and sound and feel.  Now, the chances that whatever we end up developing will match that vision even 50% of the time is probably 1 in 10, but the point is, my initial impulses towards the material were immediately there, which for me as a director is a sign that I'm connected and ready to work.

We've been doing some character work by focusing on the idea of archetypes. Host desecration plays and vaudeville acts both relied heavily on easily recognizable archetypes, so I'm trying to use our vision of these characters in the popular imagination as a window in to how they should be played. What do we think about when we think about outspoken, angry atheists? Or shady salesmen? Or a female leftist Tenured College Professor?

That last one is particularly interesting, because we're trying to use the Right's idea of a female leftists Tenured College Professor (which is obviously villainous) as opposed to the Left's idea (whihc would be more heroic). Which also goes to show you in a fractured postmodern culture that you have to worry about whose archetypes you're using.