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.

So... What is "Atheist Viagra"?

In the summary of the play, Dan calls Atheist Viagra a game of three-card-monte played with the audience, with the truth hiding under a face card. Except the game is rigged and the truth can't be known. That's pretty accurate.

Three actors appear before an audience and tell them that they have a story to tell. The story is patently ludicrous and yet, through the magic of storytelling, they get you to-- if not believe-- than at least be compelled by it. And then every few minutes or so, the rules of the play change.  It shifts genres, uses songs, dances, direct address, playing multiple characters etc. Sometimes the actors believe what they're saying, sometimes they disagree about the veracity of their accounts etc. etc.

So how, as a director, do I want to approach this play?

Atheist Viagra resists a lot of the normal ways one might approach the script. It's a slippery con-game of a play, and it's not set anywhere other than in the theatre you're currently sitting in.  It's not like I can just go do visual research into 19th century theaters again, or whatever.

So what are the starting points?

There are several.  The first piece of outside research I'm looking into are Chick Tracts.  Luckily, knowing the playwright, I happen to know that Dan has read quite a few of them (and he passed me off a magazine from the late 1990s about Jack Chick).  Chick Tracts are small ultra-right-wing Christian comic books, that really must be seen to be believed. Trust me.

Second is my own autobiography as a formerly-devout-christian-cum-atheist with a secular Jew for a mother.  And what that's taught me about religion and secularism in America. Also, the fascination its given me with those issues. I'm sure I'll be discussing more of that eventually.

The third is to progress in a more grassroots fashion with the script.  Instead of reading it and seeing how to conceptualize it, I've been reading and re-reading the script to figure out what it's rules are.  Today, I divided into scenes, with each "scene" denoting a change of the rules.  The play has 25 scenes in 79 pages.  Next step is to break down each scene. What happens? What are the rules? Who is in it? Who are they playing? etc. and then give each scene a title. And then I'll start working through scene by scene with the designers to learn as much about this play as possible by breaking it down into its component parts.

I have yet to be super inspired in a visual / sonic direction. Yet.  Often by this point some switch flips in my mind and I'm like ah yes, Anselm Kiefer and The Decemberists come to mind....  But I think via investigating each section these will come to us. Perhaps different ones for each bit.  Who knows?